


Before Tomorrow

by PatternsInTheIvy



Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe, Angst, Complete, Drama, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mentions of Suicide, Mentions of alcoholism, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Torture, Team as Family, Torture, a brief mention of, grey morality, internalized ableism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:00:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 36,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27675718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PatternsInTheIvy/pseuds/PatternsInTheIvy
Summary: Three years ago, a covert agency called DXS was dismantled after one of its top agents, Angus MacGyver, leaked confidential information to criminal organizations. Now Matty Webber has the exhaustive job of finding out exactly what happened, putting together a gruesome picture that involves, very likely, corruption in the CIA and an innocent man being accused of treason and believed dead by his former team.
Comments: 80
Kudos: 97





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is an AU with a few situations strongly borrowing from canon. A notable and relevant difference, though, is that Matty doesn't know James (and if anything else isn't clear, feel free to ask me).

When the call ends, Matty Webber suppresses the impulse to do something like throwing her phone against the wall. She’s never done something like that, but right now she feels like - there's a first time for everything in life.

Honestly, perhaps she is getting a bit too old for things like this.

It's something that she is good at, putting the pieces of a puzzle together and making sense of the big picture, but sometimes she would rather just… go back to the beginning of her career, do some fieldwork, straightforward and easy.

Instead, she's been given the job of finding out what _really_ happened with a covert agency based in Los Angeles - DXS - that sank three years ago. The type of job that isn't straightforward at all.

She's heard about DXS. Not while the former agency was still running, but after it was dismantled and disbanded and there were a few rumours. People talked about an agency that had to be brought down after one of its agents compromised it badly. Back then, three years ago, Matty didn't know the name of the agency, just that it had existed.

And now… now there is chatter again, coming up from a place so high in the chain of command that Matty, for the first time, doesn't really know to whom she is answering. The CIA has been trying to keep it hush-hush, and Matty has the sinking feeling that _they know_ that somewhere along the way someone made a mistake in the investigation, and now she is the one who has to clean up the mess. The error isn't being swept away under the carpet, which tells her that whoever is responsible for restarting this is not a person that she can afford to get on their bad side.

So Matty simply does her job. She starts by reading the reports, familiarizing herself with the known version of the facts, before starting to poke at the weak spots that she will hopefully find.

The thing is: there are already two versions of what happened, at least regarding the major culprit in the story, Angus MacGyver. Officially, he was killed when the CIA invaded the DXS headquarters and he resisted, attacking the CIA agents. Two bullets to his chest. That is what his colleagues from DXS - whoever they are - would have been told.

Reality is that there was only one bullet, and it didn't kill him. Instead, he was nursed back to health and taken to a black site where he remains until this day, the place where he admitted being guilty, after what the dossier says interrogation, but Matty knows better than to believe that. MacGyver's location is redacted, even for Matty, but she has the clearance to visit him if she so chooses.

For now, she skips the dossier about his interrogation. Matty tells herself that it's because such a dossier is a detail, and for now she's focusing on the generalities, and not because she has just had lunch and doesn't want to ruin her day so early.

Even if MacGyver is guilty, Matty has never been too comfortable with some of the aspects that come with the job. She is lucky that her talent for planning and long-term strategies has kept her mostly away from that side of things. She has never lost sight, however, that every piece of intel she ever used might have come from torture, even if not directly inflicted by her.

And well, since Matty has been so politely asked to investigate everything again, she will look at every single thing with suspicion and scepticism, so she doesn't rule out that the man might very well be innocent. She doesn't know why another investigation is being launched - it might be because someone thinks that MacGyver is innocent, or because he is guilty and his corruption was spread wider than previously thought. It could be something else altogether. It could very well be simply a result of the sudden passing of the last CIA director, Elliot Mason, and people putting the house in order.

She wasn't given a narrow goal with this, no point to focus on, and so she decides to start by looking on who MacGyver worked with, and why only he was found guilty, and if there might be someone else out there who should be considered a suspect.

Matty is surprised to find a name that she recognizes on the dossier. Jack Dalton worked with her at the CIA, and after he left the agency, she didn't keep tabs on what he was doing. Might as well begin this by investigating someone she already knew, so Matty opens Dalton's file.

After CIA, apparently, Dalton went to Afghanistan to do a babysitting job of watching EOD techs, and Matty thinks that the Dalton that she knew would have absolutely despised that. Or maybe not, because - and that is quite weird, indeed - he re-upped at the end of his tour under the condition that he would be paired with none other than MacGyver, the EOD tech he was being overwatch for.

So Dalton and MacGyver had met before DXS. Matty skims the file until she gets to the DXS debacle. There is nothing there that suggests that Dalton had ever been a suspect, which is extremely strange. Their history would make Dalton a prime suspect of involvement to anyone with two brain cells who laid eyes on this information. Sure, he was interviewed, just like every other agent and employee in the agency, but there wasn’t any focus on him.

Things getting weird and complicated so early is not what Matty anticipated, and she realizes that she won't be able to keep working only with her tablet, going back and forth between different files, so she logs in on her computer and turns on three monitors, keeping MacGyver's file on one screen, Dalton's on another, the dossier about the DXS mole problem on another. The tablet she keeps as a step screen to consult any file that she needs quickly.

And so Matty spends the afternoon and part of the night reading. She learns that besides Dalton, MacGyver's team also included Riley Davis and Wilt Bozer, the two having been hired under unusual circumstances, to put it mildly. She wonders what the hell was going on Patricia Thornton's - the DXS director at the time - mind when she decided to hire a woman who was in supermax for hacking the NSA, and a civilian who had learned about DXS in a breach of the espionage act.

The thing is: the whole team was composed of people who would be suspects in any semi-competent investigation. Dalton and Bozer because of their history with MacGyver, and Davis because of her criminal record. Also, there are clues here and there that the people on this team were more than just colleagues, the camaraderie extending into friendship - and she is not surprised to learn that Bozer and MacGyver, too, had met before DXS and were, in fact, childhood friends.

Which means that any investigation that happened was a bloody mess, and the level of incompetence tells Matty that it was on purpose. She isn't any closer to finding out why, though. At this point, she has no suspects.

But it is getting late, and there is no use in exhausting herself, especially not so early in the game.

** ** ** **

It goes for days. Matty is completely absorbed in the reports and dossiers of what happened at DXS, she becomes so familiar with everything that it almost feels like she was there to see the events. By now, she knows all about the missions that MacGyver and Dalton, and then later Davis and Bozer too, did together.

She learns that DXS had a mole problem that lasted longer than she had previously thought. The reports about the op concerning a deadly virus and a fiasco at Lake Como tell that the CIA had already been concerned with what was happening at that agency. Nikki Carpenter, Davis’s predecessor, had been contacted by the CIA, going undercover and faking her death in order to catch the mole - who officially is MacGyver.

Matty’s next step would have been talking with Carpenter, if she wasn’t permanently unavailable. A few weeks before MacGyver was outed, Nikki was killed in a CIA op in Uruguay - this time for real. Things might be related, but no one ever investigated Nikki’s death properly. The mission she was on before her death was completely unrelated to DXS, which doesn’t rule out a planned elimination.

Her next person on the list also happens to be dead. Patricia Thornton committed suicide when DXS disbanded. The woman put a bullet in her own brain. Thornton’s death, like Carpenter’s, might or might not be suspicious.

Also, there was someone acting like a general director at DXS, in a position called “Oversight” - a frankly ridiculous name - but there is no reference as to who that person might be, and where to find him or her.

Finally, there were the two CIA agents who led the op in DXS, but their names are redacted from the file. Whatever the reason, Matty's clearance doesn't give her access to that.

The next people on her list are the ones closer to the incident, to MacGyver himself, and the ones that Matty has on the list of suspects, which complicates things.

Two weeks after being assigned to the investigation, Matty has a lot of questions but no way to begin answering any of them. Her best hypotheses are still the first two she had:

  1. Not all the culprits were caught, and her prime suspects are MacGyver’s team
  2. MacGyver was framed



If Matty knew who has reopened the case, she might have some luck in finding out which one is true - or at least to which one they are trying to lead her - but any attempts on uncovering that are stopped before she can as much as try to begin inquiries.

When everything from the files leads her only to dead ends, Matty finally gives in and starts to make preparations for the visits she needs to make. Four people, to begin with, and luckily, three of them live in the same address.

Another surprise is that Angus MacGyver’s house, as per his will, was left to his friend Wilt Bozer. And Davis and Dalton also moved there after DXS ended. Matty suspects that the former agents she will find there are going through financial problems, and staying in a house that is paid for probably helps to keep them afloat. They lost their clearances and finding good jobs can’t be easy if you aren’t allowed to go near anything you did before - especially in Dalton’s and Davis’s cases.

From the files, MacGyver’s detailed confession is the strongest evidence of the entire case. He gave the names of the people he had been passing information to, he detailed the way he did so, and the information had been verified, under the scrutiny of the CIA director at the time. Matty knows that people confess to things they never did if they are pushed to their limits, but that confession, and its verification, still have a weight that she can't ignore. That makes MacGyver more of a suspect than his team, right now, so Matty decides to interview Dalton, Davis and Bozer first. She wants to be as prepared as she can be when interviewing MacGyver, and those three people might help her with that.

Despite being cornered into taking this job, Matty Webber still has a few cards up her sleeve, and she decides to use one of them now.

If someone inside the agency messed up on purpose during the investigation, she can't enlist help that comes from the CIA itself, so she makes a call, waits a few days, and then, by booking a flight to LA, finally puts the second step of her plan in practice.

** ** ** **

“I want you to observe things and tell me your impressions later,” Matty says. “But let me do the talking.”

As much as Matty trusts herself and her ability to judge people, it doesn’t hurt to enlist the help of an equally qualified professional. Samantha Cage owes her a favour or two and has come from Australia exclusively for this. Matty doubts that anyone would be able to fool both of them.

“Alright,” Cage says, and both of them leave the car.

The sun is almost setting, and Matty chose this moment purposefully. Davis and Bozer are at work and should be back in the next half hour. Dalton is probably alone at the house, having been fired from his last job in a car repair shop after - why is she not surprised - punching his boss.

Matty knocks on the door and they don’t have to wait too long before Dalton answers it. He opens the door and looks first at Sam, and when his eyes land on Matty’s, his expression closes off.

“Matty Webber.”

“Jack Dalton.”

Jack narrows his eyes and then motions to close the door, growling a “no”. Matty puts her foot between the door and the wall, keeping him from closing it.

“I know your manners were always atrocious, Dalton, but the least I expect is being invited to come in.”

Jack opens the door again, and his expression is as unfriendly as before. “What are you doing here, Matty?”

“I’m here on a business that shouldn’t be discussed outside.”

“Oh, is that so? Well, then I don’t want no part in this discussion, Matilda. I won’t help you CIA people sully the name of my boy even more than you already did. And neither will Riley and Boze, so you can turn the fuck around and tell Langley to shove it.”

Matty had anticipated something like that. From the files, no one in MacGyver’s team had believed that he was the mole. Still, the ferocious protectiveness of a dead person catches her off-guard.

She stares at Jack, trying to understand what the hell has happened to him. Because the man she knew before was sure loyal to a fault, but it is odd to see that he attached himself to someone almost a generation younger like that - and not only MacGyver, but Jack’s choice of living with Davis and Bozer, even if for financial reasons, is something that she would have never seen coming. If she didn’t know better, Matty would say that they are some sort of found family.

She’d got the impression, from reading the files, that this team was like a group of friends, but maybe she had been underestimating how close they were. Matty wonders if that will make her job easier or harder.

“We’re not here to do that,” Sam says, breaking the tension and the staring contest going on between Matty and Jack.

Despite what she instructed earlier, Matty doesn’t mind Sam’s intervention. Establishing rapport and calming down people have never been her strengths.

“And who the hell are you?” Jack asks Cage.

“Samantha Cage. Matty and I are not trying to accuse Mac of anything, we just want to talk.”

“I know what you’re trying to do, and it ain't gonna work, I am not stupid,” Jack says, seemingly even angrier. “It will take much more than calling him Mac - because you’ve read in some file about how the kid liked to be called - to convince me to talk to you.”

“Jack, I am investigating what happened at DXS,” Matty says, and because she thinks it is the only way of getting him to give her a chance - without threatening him, which would be much more counterproductive - she adds, “I think MacGyver might be innocent.”

Dalton laughs bitterly. “You’re too fucking late to say that, Matilda. Three years and two bullets too late.”

“It might not be too late to clean up his record,” Sam says. Matty doesn’t think that will work on Dalton, though. If he knew MacGyver is alive, it would, but if all they can promise is that his dead friend will stop being seen as a traitor by the CIA, that isn’t good enough.

“Great load of good that will be to him now,” he says, trying again to close the door.

She can’t tell him that MacGyver is alive, not now, at least, but she can offer him the next best thing: justice, or, as she’s sure he will understand this, revenge.

“I think he was framed and I want to find out who did that. I thought you would be interested in that,” Matty says.

The knuckles on the door turn white, and Jack opens the door, a new expression on his face that Matty would describe as a mix of determination and suspicion.

“Come in,” Jack says, and while Matty and Sam pass through the door, he adds, “You’d better not be fucking with me.”

** ** ** **

The interior of the house is in perfect order, and Matty wonders who is responsible for that - probably either Bozer or Davis. Dalton guides Sam and her to the living room, telling them to sit on the sofa.

“I’m gonna need a beer - well, I’d need something stronger for this, but…” he trails off and Matty raises one eyebrow. “You two want anything? Water, coffee, beer…”

“Thank you, but no,” Matty says.

“Water, please,” Sam replies.

Jack leaves and comes back with two bottles - the one with water he hands Samantha, and the beer one he takes a large sip of, before sitting on a couch on the other side.

“So. What do you know about who framed Mac?”

“That is classified information,” Matty replies. “You know that I can’t share that kind of intel with a civilian.”

“Then we’re back to what I asked you at the door, what the hell are you doing here?”

Matty has the impression that Sam and she would actually be in danger if she were to tell Dalton that they are there to, among other things, investigate if Jack was involved in leaking the intel, or, god forbid, if he knew that she plans to use things he says against MacGyver when she interviews him, depending on how things go.

Of course, she knows that those things pale in comparison to not telling him that MacGyver is alive, which is her biggest sin here.

Because whatever happened, Matty doesn’t think Jack was involved, in any way. And she can tell that MacGyver’s death has affected him more than she assumed from reading the files.

“I am going over the files from what happened at DXS, and there are… inconsistencies. I plan to talk with the people who were close to MacGyver to clear up those pieces that don’t fit.”

“Why now?”

Why now? Indeed. Matty herself has no idea.

“I cannot tell you.”

Jack snorts. “You should have known him. He would have gotten on your nerves, always pulling some crazy plan, and not doing things by the book,” he says, pauses and then shakes his head. “But then you would know that he didn’t do that. And that he didn’t deserve what was done to him.”

Matty doesn’t let her thoughts go to that file about what happened to MacGyver after the CIA took him, because if what Dalton is saying is true… well… even if Jack is wrong, and MacGyver is guilty, none of that should have happened, either way. But she can't help feeling even worse if he is innocent.

If what he is saying is true, then Matty, more than anything, wants to get to the bottom of this.

“Kid was like a son to me, Matty,” Jack says. “Met him back in Afghanistan and then thought to myself, well, someone needs to watch this stupid kid with a hamburger name and zero sense of self-preservation,” he is looking down, staring at the bottle in his hands. “I’m sure you read about that.”

Matty glances at Sam, who raises her eyebrows. She wasn’t expecting... this. Back in their CIA days, Jack used to talk about whatever went through his mind and wasn’t afraid to show his emotions, true, but all this… vulnerability is odd. She doesn’t know if showing vulnerability is new, or if back in the day there wasn’t that much vulnerability. Also, not for the first time, Matty wonders if that beer truly is his first dose of alcohol today.

“I know he was framed, Matty. We all know - Bozer and Riley, that is,” he says, raising his head, “I just have no way to prove that. We lost our clearances, and I'm not gonna put Riley through the danger of looking into shit that could get her killed or worse. I tried looking, in the beginning, my own way,” the last part he says with a meaningful look. “But it was no use. And, well, Riley wouldn’t forgive me if I went and got myself killed doing that.”

This isn’t going anywhere, it’s not information that can help her to learn anything about MacGyver, Matty needs to steer the conversation in another direction. Before she opens her mouth to ask Jack if MacGyver had enemies, there is a noise of a key on the door.

“That would be either Riley or Bozer,” he pauses, frowning. “Actually, because it is Friday, they are probably together, must be coming from the pizza place.”

And, true to Jack’s words, two people come in, carrying two boxes of pizzas. Matty would have recognized them from the old photos. They are chatting and laughing until they notice the presence of Matty and Sam, their postures change immediately to a guarded and cautious one.

“Jack?” Davis says, her eyes focusing on the beer bottle, before going to Matty and Sam. “Who are you?”

“What she said,” Bozer said, “And what are you doing here?”

It was almost comical that both of them are talking just like Jack Dalton. Their reaction - and Dalton’s, earlier - make it clear that this is not the first time someone from CIA came knocking on their door.

Davis puts the pizza boxes on a table and then walks up to Jack, stopping in front of him and extending her hand. She never turns her back to Matty and Sam.

“Come on, Jack, you know the rules. One per week, and only when you’re not alone.”

"I wasn't alone, Riley," Jack says, but Davis doesn't budge. With a sigh, Jack hands her the bottle, and now Matty has the confirmation that he really has an alcohol problem - probably not so out of control, though, if he can still accept the woman helping him.

“I am Matty Webber, and this is Samantha Cage. We are with the CIA, and we are investigating what happened at DXS.”

Davis’s expression shutters off completely. “We’ve got nothing to say about that,” she says with a cold tone and then she turns to Jack. “I thought you didn’t want these people here?”

Bozer walks closer, leaning against a chair and glaring at Sam and Matty.

“Matty here and I know each other from my time at the CIA, and she thinks Mac was framed,” Jack says, looking up at Davis, then at Bozer. “They think they can find who did it.”

“You do?” Bozer asks.

Sam nods, and Matty says “Yes.”

There is something different in Bozer’s eyes then - Matty thinks it might be hope or determination.

“And what brought this on?” Bozer asks. “I mean, it’s been three years.”

“I am not allowed to disclose that.”

“Not allowed - then what do you want?” Davis asks.

“We are trying to understand everything that happened before the whole debacle,” Matty says. “I was about to ask Jack whether MacGyver had enemies before you came in.”

“Besides the ones you must already know from the reports you read, you mean?” Jack asks. “There were people who were not happy with what he did, but as far as I know, none of them would be able to frame him.”

“But you know that, don’t you?” Bozer adds after Jack. "Why are you really here?"

"Mr Bozer," Matty says. "You all know how working in intelligence is, surely you haven't forgotten. I am not allowed to disclose classified information. Rest assured that I am on your side, and cooperate with me. That way it will be easier for everyone."

"We get that, Matty," Jack says. "It might not look like, but we do. I just don't know what we can tell you that you don't already know."

Matty considers her next words carefully. "I am not sure that whoever did the investigation did a good job."

She is sure that the investigation was crappy, but that doesn't necessarily mean MacGyver is innocent.

"'Course they didn't, if they thought that Mac could be a traitor," Jack replies, and Matty is once again taken aback by the faith the man has in MacGyver.

"So I am simply asking questions to make sure that I have all the information correct."

That answer seems to be enough for everyone, or at least they figure that a better one won't be given. Davis takes the boxes of pizzas and brings them to the table near the sofa, then she sits down. Bozer leaves the room and comes back with napkins and water bottles, he sits on the chair he was leaning against before.

"We weren't expecting visits," Davis says, opening one of the boxes. "But well, if you are hungry then you can help yourselves, I guess," her tone makes it clear that the last thing she wants to do is to share a meal with Matty and Sam.

"So… shoot it," Jack says, picking a slice of pizza.

** ** ** **

Talking to MacGyver’s former team is an experience of constantly steerring the conversation in the right direction. Matty thinks that if they were left unchecked, Jack, Bozer and Riley would only alternate between praising the genius of a dead man, expressing their anger at the death of said dead man, and asking questions that for the nth time, she cannot answer because they concern classified information.

Matty knows that the three former agents know how things work, and that they were competent employees at DXS - she read a lot about their missions, knows that they (and, yes, MacGyver) got results in situations where very few people would have. But they are too unfocused by their own emotions and feelings. Grief still has a strong hold on them, and if not for hers and Sam’s interventions, there would probably be tears happening, at least where Dalton and Bozer are concerned, as Davis doesn’t seem to be the type to show that kind of vulnerability to just anyone.

Justice and revenge might be strong motivations, but none of those can bring the dead back, and they are not enough to make them focus.

The conversation is not a waste, though. Matty will check with Sam later, but she doubts that any of those three people had anything whatsoever with hypothetically framing MacGyver. No one can fake that level of devotion, love and grief.

Matty almost finds herself wanting MacGyver to be innocent, but she squishes that emotion easily. If he is innocent, then he is, but that conclusion can’t be motivated by anything less than facts, evidence, and yes, some degree of conjecture and gut feeling, but Matty Webber has learned throughout her life to trust her gut, doing things that were sometimes very risky, but with a damn high reward.

She wonders if whoever chose her for this factored in that characteristic of hers to make the decision of assigning her to this investigation. Probably yes.

It is almost 10 p.m. when they leave and despite the hour, they discuss what they found out and brainstorm their next steps, plan their approach. No one doing this job is a stranger to odd hours or pulling allnighters, and though Sam accepted to help, she has to go back to Australia in two weeks, so they have to hurry things. Matty wants to get the most of Sam’s help with interviews and interrogations, and so far she doesn’t even know who she has to talk to besides MacGyver and his former team.

“What did you think of that?” Matty asks.

“The same as you, I’d guess. If MacGyver was framed, they didn’t do it, and if he had anyone helping him, it wasn’t any of them.”

Matty nods. “I agree.”

“So… when are we going to visit Angus MacGyver?”

“I want to make an initial assessment as soon as possible, then come back and work from whatever we get from him. But I also need to go over the files and my notes again. There has to be a clue to why this case was brought back, and where things are wrong. I’m probably just… overlooking it.”

“Well, I went through all your notes and I didn’t have much success either. I think we’re lacking some piece of information that will be a breakthrough.”

“Then let’s hope MacGyver can give us that because that’s where we are going tomorrow.”

** ** ** **

It’s uncertain what they will find in the black site. Matty has seen the result of torture way too many times, and though trauma is common to all victims, it manifests in different ways for each person. She’s read about MacGyver, has talked to the people who were - are? - his family in everything but name, and she knows that the man she will find is not the same one she read and heard about, regardless of how those events affected him.

The dossier she’s read was not very descriptive about the aftermath of what happened to MacGyver. It was mostly about methods and results or lack thereof, but those are enough. The whole handbook of how to use torture as a tool of interrogation had been applied there.

Samantha and Matty board a plane to go to the black site where MacGyver is being held. The flight takes a little more than three hours, but she has the impression that they’d been flying “in circles” for some time. They use those hours to recap the goal for the day, which is tackling the matter of MacGyver’s motivation. Up until the DXS debacle, he had a perfect record. Sure, a few warnings on his file for pulling off reckless, completely out of the book plans - and from what Matty read, it seems like MacGyver had zero sense of self-preservation.

But nothing in those files indicated that he was going to commit treason. The best clue they have is a bank account with ten million Euros under a fake name in the Cayman Islands that allegedly belonged to MacGyver. Somehow, Matty can’t quite buy that. The man was smart enough to get into MIT, and if he ever decided that money like that was his goal, he wouldn’t have needed to commit treason. Perhaps that was a cover for his real motivation, or simply a reward for what he did, but not the true reason for the act.

Revenge and ideology don’t fit either.

There is the matter of his father, though. James MacGyver walked away when Angus was ten years old and has never again been seen. The complete lack of information about the man tells Matty that he’s either dead or that someone deleted everything about him from the CIA database. She does have people on the FBI looking for clues about James’s whereabouts, even if they don’t know why.

How his father might be hypothetically connected to DXS, Matty still has no clue.

The facility where MacGyver is being kept has only minimal personnel. Sam and she are guided to an interrogation room where MacGyver is already waiting for them.

Just as predicted, Matty recognizes the man in front of her, but she can't help but notice that he looks very different from pictures on his file - at least the ones that were taken before DXS fell.

MacGyver's blond hair is longer, almost on his shoulders, it looks oily and unkempt, a contrast to the soft and shiny golden from the pictures. He is much thinner, and his blue eyes are dull.

Both of MacGyver's hands are tied to the table, and three the fingers on his right one are curled up like claws. Nerve damage.

Matty remembers reading about his time as EOD tech, remembers Dalton talking about how the “crazy bomb nerd with nerves of steel saved his ass more times than he could count”.

His posture and attitude are clearly defensive, shoulders slightly hunched, eyes darting between Matty and Sam.

"Mr MacGyver, my name is Samantha Cage, and this is my colleague Matilda Webber. You can call us by Sam and Matty. Do you have a way that you prefer to be called?"

MacGyver simply shrugs in reply.

"Is it okay if I call you Mac?" They do know that is the name he preferred to go by.

"You can call me anything," he replies.

"Okay," Sam says, giving him a smile. "We are here to talk to you about what happened with DXS."

MacGyver swallows, his hands tremble before he curls them into fists. "I already told you everything you wanted to know."

"But we didn't ask you anything," Matty says, even though she knows what he means, of course. They need to know what they are dealing with. If MacGyver was coerced into confessing a crime he did not commit, he might be still fearful of telling other people about what happened. If he is hiding something else, he will try to keep that secret at all costs.

"You're with the CIA, aren't you?" He asks.

"We are," Matty answers.

"Then you already know everything there is to know about what I did."

"And what is it that you did, Mac?" Matty asks.

"I leaked information about safe houses and cover identities used by DXS agents to criminal organizations in Europe and Asia. I compromised dozens of agents and ops."

MacGyver says the words, meeting her gaze unflinchingly, but his left hand fidgets.

"Agents died because of me," he adds, eyebrows pinched.

"Do you regret it?" Sam asks.

MacGyver looks down at his hands, he flexes the fingers that are damaged, but they move slowly, and the effort has that entire hand trembling.

"It got me here," he says, "I regret not doing a better job of it."

Matty puts her tablet on the table. She scrolls through her files until she finds the list of agents that were compromised until she finds the photos of their families. She turns the device to MacGyver.

"This little girl is growing up without a mother because of what you did," Matty says, she goes to another picture, "These parents could never bury their son because the body was never found."

Matty squares her shoulders and goes on.

"You destroyed these lives and you don't regret it?"

MacGyver shrugs.

"We read a lot about you, Mac," Sam says softly. They agreed not to mention visiting his old team, it's too soon for that. "And both Matty and I are used to doing this, but neither of us can understand the motivation behind what you did."

"What does it matter?" MacGyver asks. "It happened because of me, I am guilty, so why do you need a motive?"

Matty frowns at the choice of words. _It happened because of me_ is not the same as _I did it_. It might not be important, but she files that for later.

"Because motivation lies at the root of every human action," Sam says. "Even the most seemingly incomprehensible ones."

"Whatever the reason, it doesn't change the act," MacGyver says.

"You are right," Sam replies. "But my job is understanding people. Indulge me."

From the files, all they know is that MacGyver confessed and gave the names of people who had helped him outside of DXS, and to whom he'd given the information. After that, there wasn't a lot of interest in what his motivation was.

MacGyver's eyes go from side to side before he quickly lowers his head, staring at the table. It is enough to tell that he is about to lie. That is such a common tell, one that even civilians who were never trained to see through lies can detect, but perhaps the man is too tired or nervous to suppress it.

Matty mentally sighs. MacGyver has been lying throughout the interview. She has seen it, and maybe Sam has seen even more tells. But he also told the truth, at moments, and they will need to watch a recording of this conversation to parse things out.

She waits for the lie, but MacGyver chooses to remain silent for long seconds, and when he speaks again, it is not to answer the question.

"I was trained to lie, you know what I did before."

Sam laughs. "And I was trained to interrogate people like you," she lowers her voice, "To be honest, I've met much better liars in my career."

That gets the strongest reaction out of the man during the entire they’ve been there. He sets his chin, leans against the chair, muscles locked in. Determination. Matty and Sam won't get him to talk more today. But she also sees the fear underneath.

He thinks we are going to torture him if he refuses to talk.

But MacGyver also seems to know that, if he talks, he will, one way or another, admit things that he doesn't want to. And yet, he chooses to be put through pain to keep whatever secret he is trying to protect, which in itself is progress. At least now they know that he does have something to hide, that confessing to treason wasn't the end to his secrets.

They just don't know what it is.

Matty stands up, and the noise of the chair scraping on the floor has MacGyver barely suppressing a flinch.

"That will be all for the day, Mr MacGyver," Matty says.

He blinks, stares at Matty, then at Sam as if waiting for the other shoe to drop. Cage also stands up, and when all that she and Matty do is get some distance from the table, MacGyver's white-knuckled grip on the chains around his wrists relaxes a bit, but he still looks at them with defiance that serves to disguise how afraid he is. Afraid, but prepared and resigned.

Matty almost _doesn’t_ want MacGyver to be innocent.

** ** ** **

“He does believe that he is guilty,” Matty says, pausing the video. Sam and she are back at the plane, going home.

“Yes, I agree,” Sam says. “Every time Angus says that things happened because of him, he is telling the truth. But,” she rewinds the video. “Look here.”

 _I regret not doing a better job of it_.

“There is this microexpression… here,” Sam points at the screen, and Matty sees the twitch of MacGyver’s left eye. “I think he is lying. I would need to spend more time with him to be sure,” she rewinds the video more.

 _Agents died because of me_.

“But he does believe those agents’ deaths are his fault. I need more time.”

Matty nods. “He is too skittish, for lack of a better word. We will need to be… softer, I guess. Today he closed off after you called him out on the lies.”

“I’m sorry. For a moment I thought he was… challenging us, and I thought that accepting that challenge would be a good way to get him talking,” Sam frowns. “But it wasn’t a challenge. He was just trying to get us to stop asking questions.”

“Which he did.”

“Well, either way, _for me_ it is a challenge. I never met anyone who didn’t tell me all the secrets in the end, so the next time I will do better.”

When they get back to Washington, Matty goes to her office and makes calls. There is no news on the James MacGyver front, but she pulls in favours that she’s owed here and there, and for the first time in almost a month, she manages to get an inkling of where the order to reopen this case came from.

It is not what she expected, at all, and things get even more complicated.

Because apparently, the new CIA director, Amanda Moore, has issued the order after making an agreement with a foreign clandestine agency in exchange of intel. The nature of the information is unknown, and so is the name of the agency. But there is one piece of relevant, straightforward information: the name Russ Taylor.

Matty has heard of him. His questionable reputation precedes him, and it makes her uneasy to know that he’s involved in this at all. Soon after she learns that new development, Matty has one of her assistants pulling all information that exists on the man.

The next two calls she makes are to the agents who were involved in MacGyver’s interrogation. Catherine Hill, Raphael Turner and John Sullivan. She doesn’t want to lose a lot of time talking to them, but the files of MacGyver’s interrogation say that finally breaking him was a joint effort, and she wants to confirm that.

She calls Hill first, simply because she’s going by alphabetical order.

The woman sounds tired and doesn’t resist much to Matty’s strategy to get the information she needs. There’s a lot of stuff that Matty already knows, but there is one thing that is completely new: the CIA director at the time, Elliot Mason, participated in the interrogation, and that he was the one who got MacGyver’s confession. Matty masks her surprise at hearing that.

Then she calls Sullivan and Turner, and they tell her the same.

Someone scrubbed Mason’s name out of the files, and she has no idea why. And she doesn’t like at all of where this is going.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thoughts?


	2. Chapter 2

Matty would have liked to go back to the black site to talk with MacGyver immediately, but the revelation about Mason’s name being deleted from the files has her taking two days to look into that.

Mason had verified the information given by MacGyver, but for some reason, the files don’t mention that he was present at the interrogation. And now one thing starts to make sense: the investigation was launched after Mason’s death, probably because he, as the director of the CIA, would have been able to stop it. That is the most immediate conclusion that can be drawn from the facts. The timing is too close to be coincidental.

It is not strange that Mason, as the CIA director, would be interested in the mole problem of another agency, but deleting his name from the interrogation file has no explanation that doesn’t lead Matty to be suspicious of him.

Again, Matty _hates_ that she’s been given this job. Yet, at the same time, she is glad for being the person to be doing this, because if this is going where she thinks it is, then _someone_ needs to follow the trails until the end, and Matty trusts herself to do that, both in skills and morals.

Her priority becomes to find a connection between Elliot Mason and DXS, but without alerting anyone that might have also been involved. Amanda Moore is likely safe since she sanctioned reopening the investigation, and Matty doesn’t know what to make of the three agents that did interrogate and tortured MacGyver and their admission that Mason had been there. They hadn’t even been instructed to lie.

Investigating the previous director is not a task that she would trust anyone to do, so Matty spends the entire rest of the night looking into that. On the next day, she gives up visiting MacGyver again, in order to keep getting information about Mason.

Elliot Mason had been a brilliant operative who worked in different clandestine agencies after the CIA. His incredible field skills, tactical ability and knowledge of the workings of intelligence in various agencies inside and outside the US landed him the position of director at the CIA, twenty years after he’d left that agency for the first time.

Before his death, he’d been the director for five years. He did a good job at the agency, and that is something that Matty knows without needing to investigate. His efficiency and forward-thinking was something that she had appreciated during the last five years. Out of the office, he had a discreet life - a wife and a son, who died six years ago.

Mason had been the one to start the investigation at DXS, six months after he’d started as the CIA director.

So far, nothing seems out of place.

She makes a pause for lunch and one call from her office is forwarded to her mobile phone while she is at the restaurant. The region code of the number gives her an idea of who it is.

“Webber,” she says, accepting the call.

“Hey, Matty. It’s Dalton.”

“You just interrupted my lunch, Jack. Do you have a good reason for that or are you just trying to annoy me?”

“Yeah, ‘bout that… look, Matty, that day you were here, I wasn’t really on my best day.”

“Does that have anything to do with your alcohol problem?”

“Maybe,” she detects embarrassment on his voice. “Riley gave me a lecture because of that already - with reason.”

“I can imagine,” Riley Davis’ biological father, Elwood Davis, used to have an alcohol problem too, and Matty can only assume that the woman would definitely have a problem with Dalton going down the same path.

“Anyway. I’m just calling to tell you that whatever help you need to find out who framed Mac… just ask me. I wasn’t sure that was clear from the visit, but I’d do anything to help you with that. The kids would too - they were kinda rude to you, but don’t mind them, they… _we_ took everything hard, but we’d help.”

Matty rolls her eyes at Dalton calling Davis and Bozer “kids” because they are pushing thirty, worked in espionage, and that is the last word she would use to refer to them.

“If I need a group of washed-up former spies to pull some crazy stunt you are the first one that will come to mind,” she only half-jokes. Depending on how things go, she actually will ask for their help.

“ _Anything_ , you call us.”

“I got that already, Dalton. Can I go back to my lunch now, or do you want to talk my ear off?”

“Yeah, do that, Matilda,” he pauses. “And Matty? Thanks.”

“I have no idea why you are thanking me,” she replies and hangs up.

Of course Matty already had that idea before, but as she learns more and more about the whole situation, she thinks that she really could use some help. Particularly, Davis’s help. The person who was able to hack the NSA is the perfect candidate to help her find information that no one can. Information on MacGyver’s father, on the DXS Oversight, and also on Mason and Taylor, if the information she has about them isn’t sufficient.

Suppose that MacGyver is innocent. Then Matty would have Davis’s help in the blink of an eye.

Suppose he isn’t… would Matty be above lying and manipulating the other woman into helping her?

She isn’t sure.

Matty goes back to her office and continues to study Elliot Mason.

He’d been the one to start the investigation about DXS, and he had to be very invested on that if he interrogated MacGyver personally. Maybe he had become obsessed with that case, for one reason or another - Matty had seen that happening to people - which would justify many of the possibilities and explanations going through her mind now.

Matty wouldn’t say that Elliot Mason was the kind of man to lose it like that, but… when things like that happen, many times they concern people with spotless records. Case in point: Angus MacGyver committing treason.

She will need to mention Mason to MacGyver and see what happens.

Next, Matty opens the complete dossier on Russ Taylor. She is impressed with the work that her assistant did on this - maybe it is time to stop terrorizing the poor boy. He’s already proven himself enough.

Taylor had been let go of MI6 due to questionable conduct, but that was almost two decades ago. After that, the man took a deep dive into the world of shadier and shadier organizations, some of them connected to different governments, others paramilitary. The last news was that he was back in England, running a clandestine agency.

He was the kind of man that many times had helped the enemies that the CIA fought against. His known activities are detailed meticulously in the dossier but despite that, the information is useless.

No ties to DXS or to MacGyver specifically are mentioned on his file and Matty can’t see why he would be interested in reopening an old investigation like that one.

Well, she will need to talk to Amanda Moore, try to find out why Russ Taylor of all people came offering intel in exchange for the investigation. But that will have to wait because now she has to make the preparations for MacGyver’s next interview.

** ** ** **

They have a more solid plan this time. Matty updates Sam about Elliot Mason’s role in MacGyver’s interrogation and torture, and after some discussion, they decide on mentioning that part last, to leave it for a time when he’s already too tired and less likely to successfully fool them or avoid questions. Start talking about his time at MIT - a safe subject, as far as they know - then bring up his father and childhood, maybe Afghanistan, to have a better grasp of his reactions, then mention the visit to his former team and, lastly, Mason. But the script is not set in stone, and if the conversation goes well in another direction, they will just go with the flow.

But just as Matty already said, go… softer. She honestly doesn’t want to scare him into thinking that he will be tortured if he doesn’t talk, playing his fears like that makes her uneasy, and she would rather not. It will be very hard to establish any trust between them as there is no way that MacGyver would ever feel safe in that black site, talking to people who work for the same organization who tortured him. But she prefers to try that, even if it is harder.

But doing that is a task that takes days. Matty and Sam go to the black site day after day to pry out of MacGyver what mostly consists of one syllable answers, shrugs and silences. The trips to and back the place take time, and when they get to the sixth day of consecutive interviews, Matty is determined to get results, fast. No more information about James MacGyver, Russ Taylor or DXS Oversight comes, and MacGyver continues to be their best shot at getting any information.

The only new information she learns by skimming through files is that three of the members of the CIA tac team that stormed DXS were killed. Two of the deaths were not suspicious, the men died on missions, but the third one died in a mugging. Of course, highly trained soldiers are not immune to being attacked by common criminals, but Matty doesn’t let that, or the fact that those three men were together in other missions too, fool her. Knowing that someone from the tac team was the person who supposedly killed MacGyver, it’s not hard to put two and two together to find out who did that.

It’s not surprising that Dalton was hunting that particular tac team - and doing a good job of it, not having been caught - Matty just wonders what made him stop at that body count. She already knew that what he meant with “tried to look for who framed MacGyver his way”.

So her only hope of getting answers, for now, is through MacGyver unhelpful self. She hopes that the fact that torture is not happening, even in the face of his uncooperative attitude, is enough for that bit of basic trust to be growing little by little. But things don’t look promising. She decides to try something different.

This time, before entering the room where MacGyver is waiting for Sam and her, Matty asks the guard to hand her the key to the handcuffs.

“I am not sure that is advisable,” the man replies.

“Are you paid to give your opinions on how I do my job?”

The guard sighs and gives her the key, and then opens the door.

MacGyver looks more… prepared than last time. He is sitting straight on the chair, no hunched shoulders or defensive visage. Good, because Sam and Matty also came more prepared for this meeting.

“Do you mind?” Matty asks Sam, handing her the keys, while she sits down, picks up her tablet and navigates through her files, opening an image.

“Sorry,” Sam says when she touches MacGyver’s hands while opening the handcuffs, making him flinch at the contact. There is a flicker of embarrassment on his face for a second, but then he schools his expression to a neutral one.

The man keeps his hands down, entwined, resting on his thighs.

Matty pushes the tablet to MacGyver’s side of the table. He looks at the screen, frowning. She smirks, knowing that he didn’t expect that.

The idea came to her when she was talking to MacGyver’s team, listening to them raving about how he could fix anything using stuff he had around.

“This is from a car toy that belongs to my niece,” Matty explains. “It broke, and although I told her that I’d buy her a new one, she likes this one. Do you think I can fix it?”

Frown deepening, MacGyver leans on the chair to peer at the picture. “Can I increase the brightness of the screen?”

“Go ahead.”

MacGyver uses his left hand to adjust the brightness and then goes back to keeping both hands under the table. He looks at the picture for a few seconds and Matty notices when his eyes widen slightly.

“There is a fried resistor,” he says. “You just have to replace it.”

“Really?” Matty says. “Where?”

MacGyver swallows and pushes the tablet towards Matty, pointing at one point on the screen. “This one.”

Matty nods. “And what if it happens again and I don’t have a spare resistor around?”

MacGyver looks at Matty suspiciously, then at Sam. “What are you doing?”

“Discussing how to fix an electrical circuit, I thought that was obvious.”

The man snorts, looks down at the tablet screen, then at his hands. “Right,” he answers, and there is a bit of sarcasm in his voice and Matty thinks he will be difficult again, but he shrugs and goes on. “You can make a resistor using a piece of paper, a pencil and two paperclips,” Matty raises one eyebrow encouraging him to continue. “Draw a rectangle on the paper, and paint it using the pencil. You have to fill all the spaces with graphite. Then you put a paperclip on each side of the rectangle - they can’t touch each other, or the circuit will be in short - and you have a resistor.”

“I see. I actually think I’m gonna try it,” Matty says.

MacGyver looks doubtful.

“Did you learn that at MIT?” Sam asks.

“No.”

“Where did you, then?”

“My father liked to teach me that sort of thing.”

Oh well, the conversation ends up going to his father before they predicted, but Matty decides to let it continue in that direction since it happened naturally.

“So your father had a lot of influence on your life, despite what happened,” Matty says.

The look on MacGyver’s face and the way his mouth curls down show the expected bitterness where his father is concerned.

“Unfortunately,” MacGyver says.

“But aren’t you proud of the things you know?” Sam asks. “I mean, it’s pretty neat, making a resistor out of paperclips, paper and graphite… not to mention everything else that I read about.”

MacGyver gives her a look and Matty can’t quite decipher. It’s like he’s bored, or tired. Confused, perhaps.

“We all know that I won’t be doing those things anymore, so… there’s no point.”

Matty isn’t sure if he means that because of his hand or because of where he is - the MacGyver described by his former team wouldn’t let an injury like that stop him, but the way the injury happened wasn’t just an accident from which he recovered.

“Do you ever regret leaving MIT and enlisting?”

“Yes…” he looks down, “and no. I don’t know. What is the meaning of this?” He asks, gesturing at Matty and Sam. “I thou—” he cuts himself and looks away.

“You thought?” Sam asks.

“Nothing," he says through his teeth. "Can’t you just get to the point?”

“We are just talking, nothing more,” she points out.

“Yeah? And how long until you’ll get tired of just talking?” he spits, raising his voice for the first time. “But you don’t need to do that. I’ll— what do you want me to say? I’ll say it. _You know_ that.”

Matty picks the tablet and pretends to be busy looking at something. She lets Sam take over the interview because right now she needs to think.

MacGyver could be faking, but if he isn’t… well, that sounds exactly like someone who has admitted to a crime they didn’t commit and who will admit to other crimes to avoid pain. And he seems to think that Sam and Matty know exactly what is going on, that they are playing with him.

But… MacGyver is hiding something, and he was not even a little bit inclined to reveal whatever the secret is the last time. And now he is asking for them to just ask what they want already.

Maybe during the time between their visits, MacGyver has been nursing anxiety and fear enough to make him give up hiding whatever he is hiding. Well, she will test that later, if she has no other option, but for now she just watches Cage and MacGyver talk.

“Mac, we are not going to do anything other than talking,” Samantha says, eyes earnest and voice firm. Matty sees nothing but honesty in the other woman - because what she is saying is true, no matter what their conclusion is, they are not going to get there via torture.

She wonders if MacGyver can notice the honesty there too. He should be able to read enough of the situation, of Sam’s expression, to at least consider it. His past as an operative included that sort of training and experience and should be enough to give him pause.

But Samantha Cage _could_ be faking very well, for all that he knows. He has gone through this before, and it’s been years since he’s had any social interaction that could be considered healthy or normal. Matty knows how he was worked, back then. The agents who interrogated and tortured him didn’t start with violence either. One of them might have been nice, treated him better than the others, only to join in the brutality later.

MacGyver shakes his head. “What are you trying to pull off here? Playing good cop, and she,” he nods at Matty, “is the bad one?”

“No tricks,” Sam replies. “And not one as old as that,” she leans back in the chair, pulling her legs up, resting her chin on her right knee. “Come on, let’s just talk. You said you have mixed feelings about leaving MIT and enlisting. Why?” She redirects the conversation away from his father.

MacGyver sighs, and Matty doesn’t know what gets him talking today, if he believes in Cage, even just a little, if he’s tired, or if it’s the fact that he hasn’t had real conversation with someone in years, or if he thinks that refusing to talk won’t make a difference. Maybe it’s all of that put together.

“There were good things about MIT that I left behind, and there are things I’ve gained that I wouldn’t have, otherwise.”

“What made you enlist?”

They know the answer to that, of course. It is on his file, if in less energetic and wistful words and tone than those used by Wilt Bozer and Jack Dalton when they talked about MacGyver.

It’s a good question to calibrate their knowledge of his reactions and tells.

“I wanted to… help, do something that mattered.”

“And you couldn’t do that at MIT?”

MacGyver shakes his head, but leaves at that.

“Why?”

“Some things were too theoretical, and even when they weren’t… well, what difference would I make by going to my Fluid Mech lab classes and using Navier-Stokes equations to calculate the momentum of the water in a simulation tank? There were people going through things that weren’t problems written in a physics book. I could do something about that, could use all that I knew to help them.”

And what would lead someone who thought like that to commit treason, compromising missions and people that were defending the same things he did?

“You seem like you were certain of what you were doing, but you also said you regret going… why?”

“I don’t ever regret going to Afghanistan, exactly. I regret not doing better.”

It’s almost an identical phrase to the one he said before, in the first visit, and Matty wonders how the two instances will compare when they review this.

“So you can’t look back without regrets, even at something good, right?” Sam asks. “I know the feeling.”

MacGyver actually rolls his eyes at that, and Matty finds that she prefers that than the whole acting (or not acting) like a scared child.

“What? You think I don’t have reg—”

“I think you’ll say anything you need to try and establish rapport or whatever. If I tell you I used to have a dog, you’ll tell me a story about the dog you had when you were a child - or maybe you’re subtler than that, and the story will be about a cat.”

Sam puts her leg down, sitting normally again. “Actually, it was a turtle. Her name was Sally. And once, Sally escaped from the place we kept her. My sister stepped on Sally because she didn’t see her on the floor and then we decided to tie a string around one of Sally’s legs - on the other end there was a balloon filled with helium that our father brought when he visited us the day before. So even if Sally disappeared again, we would know where she was.”

“A helium balloon?” he repeats, shakes his head and even gives what could pass off as a smile.

“Our mother thought it was impractical, but we thought we were very smart.”

MacGyver is still tense, keeping his hands down as if not wanting to let Matty and Sam see them, perhaps to avoid calling attention to them. But he’s less… suspicious. He doesn’t act like he thinks they are going to open the door and bring in the towels and buckets with water any minute.

Some progress, at last.

Sam must notice that too because she goes back to their script. “You said you regret not doing better back in Afghanistan, but I find it hard to believe that was possible. I mean, you were an exceptional EOD tech. I’ve read reports written by many people about you - your instructors, your overwatch, some of your fellow EOD techs. They had nothing but praise.”

They wait for the reply. Sam and she had an idea of where talking about Afghanistan might lead them. She wonders if MacGyver will willingly talk about Alfred Peña.

He doesn’t, opting for remaining silent, looking at his lap.

“But you blame yourself for things when they go wrong.”

Matty personally wouldn’t have chosen to go there, not yet, but she believes that Sam won’t make another catastrophically wrong decision, after that first day.

“I put the blame where it should be.”

“Really? Because I’ve read Charlie Robinson’s report about Alfred Peña’s death, and I also read yours. They are very different.”

“Charlie wasn’t there when it happened, his report is about what could be seen after the explosion, not at the moment it happened.”

“He might not have been there, but _you_ were emotionally compromised concerning the event.”

“I wasn’t emotionally compromised,” he protests. “I don’t know what you’re trying to imply, but when I say I am to blame it’s because _I know_ I am, not because I’m emotional ove—”

“Did you build the bomb that killed Peña?” Cage asks, and when there is only silence in response, she pushes. “Was it you who chose the explosives, put together the wires, all those parts? Did you push him onto the pressure plate?” she leans on her elbows.

MacGyver’s presses trembling hands against his eyes, curling his body in the direction of the table, and Matty uses the opportunity to look at the other woman. Sam gives her a tiny nod as if saying “we are almost there.”

“Was it all that pressure that pushed you to do what you did? I’ve seen it happen, you know? People thinking that they are so wrong, so they might as well just… flip. Did that happen to you?”

MacGyver lets his arms fall to the sides and looks up, that neutral expression is back in place, and there is something wrong there, but Matty can’t tell exactly what.

“I am right, aren’t I?” Cage asks. “People who worked with you before DXS closed described you as someone who, I paraphrase, was brilliant but sometimes thought too much and got lost in your head. I guess they were not wrong. You spent too much time thinking, and somehow the wrong idea got into your head, and you let it fester, between one mission and another, until you did what you did.”

It sounds a bit far fetched in Matty’s opinion, like that explanation is coming out of nowhere. The man shrugs, looks away and then turns to Sam again, smiling wearily.

The reason for the wrongness hits Matty then. This is the first time since they’ve begun this that he doesn’t look scared. He is tired, sure, but all that fear is gone.

Because MacGyver thinks he is controlling the situation.

“I am right. Was it so hard to admit your motivation? You could have told us the first day we were here. Are you ashamed? Is that why you tried to hide this?”

The man thinks he is admitting to something that Cage already thought true, so he doesn’t have to work on convincing her to believe in him. And they are back to MacGyver desperately trying to keep them away from whatever secret he has, but this time he is trying to play a game that is not exactly his strongest area. In fact, he is losing and doesn’t even notice it.

“I won’t judge you,” Sam adds, leaning back in her chair. “As I’ve been saying, day after day, I just want to understand.”

“Why?”

“I want to understand where you went wrong. Maybe try to prevent others like you from doing the same.”

MacGyver looks away.

“Why did you go to work at DXS?”

“Same reason why I joined the Army.”

“Your saving people thing. So… how exactly did you end up thinking that treason was a good way of keeping all that noble, world-saving tendencies going on?” Sam asks. “Everything you just told me doesn’t make sense with this… picture I have of you, Angus MacGyver,” she puts her elbows on the table and leans against it a bit.

“Maybe you put this picture all wrong, Agent Cage. People change.”

“No, they don’t,” Sam replies instantly, and that is something she wholeheartedly believes, Matty knows that much. “People might hide things, might have layers, but they don’t change. The picture isn’t wrong. It’s the image of a man who would do a lot of things for the things he believes, and who would do even more for the people he loves. _Maybe_ _it is_ the picture of a man who _would_ commit treason for his family,” she pauses. “But it is also the man who admitted a crime that he did not commit to keep the people in his life safe.”

MacGyver looks away, swallows, rakes hands through his hair almost pulling strands away, looking down.

“Is that picture wrong?” Sam asks. “Look at me and say that I am wrong,” and there is the challenge in her voice she’s talked about after that first failed interview.

MacGyver does look up, eyes shiny but accompanied by an angry expression on his face. “If you really believe in that, you will want to leave things alone, Cage.”

“Because of Mason?” she asks and MacGyver freezes. “If it’s because of that… he’s dead. He can’t do anything against me if I go looking. _Or to you_ , or whoever he threatened you with.”

MacGyver’s breath stutters, and for a moment he looks so damn hopeful, and that’s when Matty _knows_ that he’s innocent, she has no doubts. A lot of the story is missing, and somehow MacGyver believes he is guilty of getting people killed, which might have involved manipulation that Matty is not going to contemplate right now, but he, too, still knows that he’s innocent of giving up the names and safe houses, and for the first time he’s let anyone else see it, against his own will.

But the hope is gone in the next second. Back are the walls, the fear, and something else that she can’t quite place.

“You go back and tell Mason that I won’t fall for this, that he can stop playing these games.”

“We are telling you the truth,” Sam says.

“I didn’t tell you anything,” MacGyver replies, and he seems a bit out of it. He stands up abruptly, and the chair screeches. “You tell him that I didn’t tell you anything.”

Sam and Matty both stand up, although Sam takes a few steps towards MacGyver, her hands gesturing as if she’s trying to calm a wounded, frightened animal. There is noise outside, people will come in, and if they can’t get MacGyver to sit down again, this will not end well.

“Hey, Mac, look at me,” Sam says, and continues even though the man doesn’t obey - doesn’t even seem to process - the command. “We are not lying to you. I give you my word.”

“I don’t care about your word!” He roars and slaps the table with both hands. Then he raises the right one, the misshapen fingers shaking in his attempt to point with the forefinger. “You tell Mason that I didn’t say anything,” Matty thinks that MacGyver wants to come off as furious and commanding, but it sounds like he is pleading.

The door is opened, and two guards rush inside, one of them carrying a syringe. MacGyver is still shouting, repeating over and over that Sam and Matty need to tell Mason that he didn’t say anything.

“This is not necessary,” Matty says as the two men grab MacGyver and drop him against the table none too gently. But they ignore her, one of them stabbing the prisoner’s arm with the needle and injecting whatever sedative is inside it. MacGyver doesn't struggle throughout the whole ordeal, he just keeps saying that he didn't tell them anything, until the sedative takes hold of him.

“I have express orders on how to deal with aggressive prisoners. Taking off the handcuffs was a bad idea, I tried to warn you, Agent Webber.”

Matty doesn’t argue, she is already exhausted, but she does look at the name tag on the guard’s uniform and memorizes it. “Be careful,” she warns as the two men haul MacGyver’s unconscious body off the table. She wants to say ‘be careful because this is an innocent man,’ but she knows that her words would not matter. All that she can do is finish the investigation, find proof that MacGyver is innocent.

** ** ** **

“Do you think you can get him to talk again?” Matty asks when they are back in the plane, both deep in thought. They aren’t any closer to understanding _why_ Mason did what he did, and MacGyver continues to be the only person who might know that.

“Not soon, or at all. This was a very traumatic experience for him, one I was completely responsible for.”

Matty had feared that.

“I was focused on finding out if he was guilty and, if that wasn’t the case, confirming that Mason was threatening people to get him to admit a crime he didn’t commit. I knew that this reaction was a very likely possibility with the way I chose to handle things, but I frankly don’t think there were many other options, not with the schedule we’re in.”

Nodding, Matty leans against the seat. She can tell that exhaustion is just there, beneath the surface, waiting for an opportunity to make itself known.

“When did you know that he was innocent?” Matty herself had doubted in a few moments. “Or did you throw in Mason just to confirm it?”

“Many things, but everything he said, even in his most uncooperative days, helped me create this model of how he acts when he is saying the truth and when he’s not. From his report about Alfred Peña’s death, I knew that he obviously blames himself for things that I am not sure he is guilty of, so that behaviour is not something new. I don’t know why and how Elliot Mason got him to _believe_ he is guilty of leaking classified information despite not having done it, but that’s what happened.”

“Any idea of what was Mason’s motivation?”

“The usual. Somehow this case became personal for him. Perhaps he needed a scapegoat. I only return to Australia in four days, so I can try to trace a profile for him. Trying to talk with MacGyver will be useless now. He not only thinks that Mason can stop us from doing an honest investigation, he thinks we are in league with him.”

“I agree that it was personal. Why would he fake MacGyver’s death and keep him in prison? It doesn’t make sense. If he wanted a scapegoat, wouldn’t it be better if the scapegoat was actually dead?”

Samantha nods.

But Matty pushes that out of her mind for a few hours, because now she needs to plan how she is going to tell MacGyver’s team that their friend is not dead, but in a black site, accused of a crime he didn’t commit and deeply traumatized. It’s one of the conversations she’s looking forward the least in her entire career.

** ** ** **

In the end, Matty decides to tell Jack Dalton first. She debates, for some time, that having the entire team together would be more practical, but Dalton’s reaction will already be a handful, if things go as she expects, and she doesn’t need the chore of dealing with three people receiving news like that.

It is not like she is friends with Jack Dalton, one doesn’t usually make friends inside the agency - which is another aspect that surprises her when she thinks of the little family MacGyver and his team were in DXS (still are?). But there is a mutual respect there, and she would rather not be the person to tell him the truth about MacGyver, because while she knows that he will be elated to learn that the man is alive - the whole team will - Matty also knows that learning about the torture will make things… ugly.

Any person would be angry to find out that someone close to them was framed and tortured to the point of confessing a crime they did not commit. But not everyone is a former operative, who worked at DXS, CIA and who’d been in Delta Force. Not everyone can pack deadly training behind protectiveness and righteous fury…

She doesn’t know the details of how Jack didn’t actually go on a lasting murderous rampage after MacGyver’s death, although she isn’t quite sure if the three guys from the tac team were the only people he targeted, but regardless, the fact that he’s been actually trying to live a semi-normal life - minus the brush with alcoholism - is surprising. And maybe, in a way, it will be harder to learn that Angus MacGyver wasn’t at peace, even if after an unfair death, but alive and having gone through torture that left him scarred and traumatized.

It’s not that Matty is afraid, although she is cautious and prepared, but it’s just something that she would rather… not do.

None of this is her fault, apart from letting Dalton, Davis and Bozer believe for almost an entire additional month that MacGyver is dead. But it is her responsibility to tell them now, so her preferences don’t really matter.

Matty waits one day, busies herself with everything else relating to the investigation, sets up an appointment with the Director - Amanda Moore sure knows what she wants to talk about, and if Matty didn’t know better, she would say that the other woman even sounded… relieved when she said that a meeting was necessary.

And the next day she finds herself once again on the doorstep of MacGyver’s team. Today she times her arrival to half an hour later after both Bozer and Davis left for work. Dalton’s hostility is gone, and he generally looks more put together. There is a computer on the table near the couch, and a job application on its screen.

“You got news?”

“Yes.”

The plan is simple: first talk about everything that she will need help with, then tell him that MacGyver is alive and only then reveal that she knew that all along.

“Elliot Mason was the one who framed MacGyver.”

“The CIA Director?” Jack asks, but it’s clear that he’s just saying that to fill the silence. He knows very well who Elliot Mason is.

“Not anymore. He’s dead.”

“Damn,” Dalton barked. “Haven’t really kept up with the news since… But I’m sure he wasn’t alone on this?”

“That’s what I am trying to discover. I got to a few dead ends, and you’ll understand me when I say that I don’t trust a lot of people in the CIA to help me with that.”

“Yeah, of course. You want our help, I already said that you have it.”

Matty nodded. “There are a few things that I need to tell you first,” what a euphemism.

“How did he do it? And why?”

“I am not sure how he did it,” though she does have a guess that has been practically confirmed by MacGyver’s outburst. “As to why… that is even more nebulous, but I am working on it. I have someone - you remember Cage? She’s former CIA, and someone I do trust. She has a background in psychology, so she’s helping me to create a profile on Elliot Mason to try and find out why he framed MacGyver. But I am afraid that our information is sparse, so I need someone who can dig that information for me.”

“Riley.”

Matty nods. “There is also the matter of how this investigation was relaunched. I was able to gather some information on that, and I’ll talk directly to Amanda Moore, the new Director, to try and understand more about that. But the order to reopen the case came from her, directly.”

Jack frowns. “Right after Mason’s death, I’d bet?”

“Yes. And what’s stranger is that she did that because an agent of a clandestine foreign agency promised intel in exchange. Yes, Jack, I know how it all sounds really odd and problematic. There’s more. The foreign agent who did it was Russ Taylor.”

“Taylor? Wasn’t he… like, working on black ops for whoever paid more at some point? Got booted from MI6?”

“The one and the same. I already read all your team’s mission reports, and everything from before DXS written by you and MacGyver, and I’ve read a lot of DXS files in general. I can’t find a connection between Russ Taylor and… any of this,” she pauses. “I need Davis’ help with that, but I also need yours. I need you to think of anything that might make sense.”

“Well, Matty, you know that Mac never met Taylor, I mean, neither did I,” he frowns. “But I’ll go over everything again. Just hand me the files.”

“I’ll do it.”

This is it. The moment of truth. Matty doesn’t quite know how to go about this other to just blurt ‘Well, Jack, it turns out that Angus MacGyver has been alive all these years’ so she decides to prepare the ground for the news.

She clears her throat. “Jack, I am going over the CIA files about MacGyver’s death as well, the day it happened, I mean. I want to check whether there are inconsistencies. Could you tell me what you remember?”

Jack looks away and swallows. “Shit, Matty,” he murmurs. “Yeah, yeah, I can do that. Just lemme… remember things.”

As if Matty would believe that the memory is anything but imprinted on his brain. But she doesn’t call Jack on that.

After a long minute, he begins.

“We were in the war room, Thornton was briefing us on a mission. Riley and Bozer were there too. The alarms in the building started to sound, and we didn’t know what was happening. Not even Thornton knew. We had our guns on us, except Mac, of course — he didn’t like guns, you know? Anyway… before we could do much, we saw a tac team storming the building. It looked like a small army, and I ain’t even exaggerating. There were maybe twenty of them only in the war room. And then there were CIA agents there. They weren’t acting out of the normal.

“You know that we had a mole problem for a long time, right? It was going for a good six months already. The agents gave us their names, David Mendez and Laura Anderson. I looked a lot for them... after, couldn’t find anything, I’m pretty sure those were fake names, and they simply disappeared off the face of the Earth."

Matty would agree with that, considering that their names are redacted. Actually, she is moderately sure that if the genuine identities of the two agents are ever revealed, she will find that both of them are dead.

“They asked us to follow them, that we would all be taken to be questioned. I thought it was about the mole, it wasn’t unusual that the CIA would get involved - and there was the whole Nikki thing, so _we knew_ that they were involved - and I thought the day would suck, you know, being held and questioned, but nothing beyond that. We were cooperating, Matty. I know they said that Mac resisted, but he didn’t, none of us did. You have to understand that.”

Matty nods. “And then?”

Jack grimaces, scrubs a hand over his face. “They were taking us to the cars - there were many cars parked outside. And I knew there were snipers in a few of the. I fucking knew it. They separated us, you know, one on each car. And yeah, I was on edge, but I didn’t think that would happen… it was nothing outside the CIA protocol, especially when dealing with another agency. I knew that none of us would do something stupid with that much guns trained on us.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Jack,” she hates having to say that, but she needs him to keep going. “You wouldn’t be able to fight your way out of that much fire. And you said yourself, nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary.”

He gives her a look that says that he doesn’t believe it and that no one would ever be able to convince him of the contrary.

“They led me to one of the cars and Mac to the one right in front of it. I was there, less than ten feet away, when I heard the shots. No matter what they say, Matty, it was a fucking execution. They weren’t there to arrest Mac, even if they thought he really was a traitor. They were there to execute him.

“Then Mac looked down, you know, touched his stomach and his hand had blood on it, and it was like he didn’t understand what was happening. He fell and after that… I don’t really remember much. Bozer and Riley tell me that I attacked the guys from the tac team that were near me, and I was... contained. But why didn’t they shoot me? _I_ was the one who resisted, who attacked them. Why didn’t they kill me too? Because they were there to kill him.

“Woke up in a cell and then I was taken to interrogation. I don’t know how much time I was unconscious, all I knew was that I needed to have news about Mac, but I knew that a sniper wouldn’t miss, not that close, Matty. _I know how that works,_ I did that enough times to know that there was no missing a shot like that one, much less two. Still, I told them I wouldn’t cooperate until they let me know about Mac. Even if I knew what I was going to hear, I still needed to hear it. And I don’t know, some part of me maybe had some hope. When someone who did come to tell me, it was Mendez again. He told me that Mac was… was dead. And then started on the bullshit that he was the mole.”

Matty already knows all of that, and Jack’s version isn’t different from the CIA report, except for the part where they say that MacGyver was uncooperative and aggressive.

It all makes sense, from the point of view of Mason’s goal of framing MacGyver, but why would he go to such lengths to fake a death? It would have been much easier to actually kill the man. She desperately needs to understand that.

“They held me - us all, I learned later - for days. Interrogated us for days, trying to get us to talk about Mac and twist anything we said in a way that made him look guilty. I didn’t say anything, of course, I knew very well what was happening. But Bozer and Riley weren’t as experienced in this… and things they said were distorted into something else to make it look like Mac could have committed treason… anyway… I couldn’t go to the fucking funeral, Matty. There wasn’t one. They just buried him in a random place like he was no one, while I was being held by the CIA.”

To make a point of something that she will need to bring up later, she lies, “I didn’t know that you weren’t at the funeral. The CIA report says that your entire team was let go after two days, and I assumed you—”

“Well, you assumed it wrong!” he says, furiously, and then raises his hands in surrender. “Yeah, you’re just trying to help, I get it. But I haven’t talked about it in a long time, you know? After that I just… I wanted to destroy the CIA with my bare hands if it need be. I started to look for the agents who were there, but I told you, there was nothing about them that I could follow… I tried other leads, then,” he hesitates and looks away.

“You killed those three men from the tac team, which I suppose was the only information you managed to get at the time.”

His head snaps back to look at her. “You know that?”

“Of course I know.”

“And you aren’t gonna—”

“No, I won’t. Come on, Jack, we both know that no one gets as far as I did in intelligence without pretending not to see a few things here and there. Believe me, I had to ignore murder that happened under less tolerable circumstances. To be honest, I am surprised you stopped at that,” but her mild curiosity is not enough to make her go on that direction. There are more pressing matters to be discussed, and she can’t keep putting them off any more than she already did.

Matty gets her bag and fishes for her tablet. “Jack, there is one thing that I haven’t told you yet. I need you to remain calm, and not to lose it, okay?”

Jack frowns, but nods. “I ain’t gonna lose it until I am face to face with any bastard who is responsible for this.”

“And I need you to understand that you will have questions that I don’t know how to answer either, ok? There is a lot to this whole investigation that I haven’t the slightest idea of how to begin putting together — yet,” looking into his eyes, she goes on. “You didn’t see MacGyver’s body being lowered six feet under, right?”

Jack’s face closes off, in the split second that takes for him to get what she is hinting. “What kind of sick joke is this, Matilda?”

“It’s not a joke, it’s the truth. I wouldn’t joke about something like that, and you know it.”

“I saw it happen!” He stands up, begins pacing. “I saw it.”

“I understand that a sniper wouldn’t miss, Jack, but what if he or she wanted to miss it?”

“But why?” he shouts. “Matilda explain.”

“I don’t know, it is one of the things I am trying to understand. Remember when you told me that if I’d known MacGyver, I’d know he didn’t do it? Well, I met him, and I agree that he isn’t a traitor.”

“You met him?!” he asks between his pacing. “No—I—,” he stops, stares at Matty like he trying to find out every single secret she has. “You are not lying?”

“No!” she unlocks the screen of her tablet and opens one of the pictures of Angus MacGyver. It is not a very recent one, having been taken at about six months ago, she would gauge, from the length of his hair. “Here,” she hands him the tablet.

Jack snatches the thing off her hand and as he looks at the screen, his hands shake. He blinks a few times, and tears run down his face. Then he frowns as something - understanding, perhaps - fall into place.

“Where is he?” he asks, but Matty knows that he already has a good idea of what the answer will be. The collar of a jumpsuit in the photo wouldn’t leave room for doubts.

“In a CIA black site.”

Dalton’s face crumples at that. In fact, it looks as if string holding him are cut, and he has to support his weight against the back of the sofa, the tablet falling from his hands, against the cushions. He recovers and resumes the pacing. There are shouts, but no words, just the sound of sorrow and anger. Matty flinches slightly when Jack punches the wall, leaving small red stains against the white surface.

“Jack,” she calls, almost tells him to calm down before she stops herself. Saying that would certainly have the opposite effect. “I am not only trying to prove that MacGyver was framed. I am trying to prove that he _is_ innocent. I want to get him out of that place.”

Dalton stops pacing and looks at her like she’s speaking another language. “Of course I am getting him out of there,” and his tone makes it clear that what he plans is to get the stash of guns that he keeps somewhere and breaking into a CIA black site.

“Jack!” she calls, raising her voice. “It is not that easy! We have to _prove_ his innocence.”

“But don’t you have proof? You said yourself that you know he’s innocent.”

This is it. Matty’s right hand goes to her gun on her hip.

“I don’t have strong proof. I interrogated him.”

“You what?” he roars, taking a step on her direction.

Matty takes a step back, and draws her gun. “Do you really think that I’d be _anywhere near you_ if I had harmed a hair on Angus MacGyver’s head, Dalton?” she asks, pointing the gun at him. “My sense of self-preservation is intact. When I say I interrogated him, I mean that I only _talked_ to him.”

Which was already bad enough, but couldn’t be helped. MacGyver won’t accept any help because Mason used to hold something against him, and in order to help him, they needed to pry the truth out of him.

He nods, still frozen, staring at the gun, and Matty doesn’t think he is _really_ alright. The gun was helpful, sure, but it wouldn’t be enough to really hold him back if he wanted to do something against her.

“Can I put the gun down now?”

“Yeah, I—I ain’t gonna do anything to you, Matilda.”

Matty snorts. “I was never someone who particularly cared for torture, Jack. It’s inhumane and it’s not even reliable,” she says and then, softly, she adds. “But he was tortured, back when he was taken by the CIA.”

Better to just rip the band-aid off, and confirm what she knows Jack himself already knows, or at the very least strongly suspects.

“Fuck,” he says, tears now flowing free. He is angry and devastated, but he doesn’t look surprised.

“And Jack… he is,” she looks for the best word to describe it, “he is probably different from what you remember. There is a lot of trauma,” God only knows what other consequences his captivity had, the ones that Matty and Sam didn’t see, “but he is still fighting, he didn’t give up.”

MacGyver was still trying to do what he thought was right, to protect his family, even at the expense of his freedom, his body and possibly his sanity. It was unfair, at the same time it was admirable.

“Of course he didn’t. He wouldn’t. But Matilda, why? Why did this happen?”

“I told you, Jack. I don’t know. I know Mason framed him, but—forgive me for saying this—the fact that he didn’t actually kill MacGyver doesn’t make sense, and that is something that I am trying to understand.”

Jack shakes his head, “You know where he is, you said you talked to him. Please, Matty, give me the location, I swear that no one will know that it was you.”

“I can’t—”

“No, you don’t want t—”

“I literally can’t!” she grits through her teeth. “I was there, true, but the location is not disclosed, even to me. I board a plane, they take me there, and then they take me back afterwards.”

“Ok,” he says, eyes darting to one side and another “Then Riley can track you when you go there.”

“Jack, hey, Jack! Listen to me! You can’t do that. If you do that, MacGyver will be hunted by the CIA for the rest of his life,” and MacGyver can’t afford to live like that, is what she doesn’t say. “We have to prove that he is innocent first. And we don’t know why Taylor is involved in the investigation, we can’t simply rush into this without even knowing all our enemies, you know that. And think, if you try to break into a black site and get yourself killed, then _who_ is going to help him?”

He looks less crazed, she can tell that her last argument was the one who got him to at least listen to her.

“I want to get MacGyver out of the place, and I know that you want it even more, but we need to do it correctly.”

Dalton pinches the bridge of his nose. “And what if we don’t find proof?”

“We will,” Matty says. “But we need to work together for that to happen,” and now she feels more in her element. This is what she does best. Plan, work, “You can tell Davis and Bozer to quit their jobs. They will do this full time from now on,” she hesitates, “and _if_ we don’t get proof, we break him out, but we will also do it, if it comes to that, the right way. We won’t rush things.”

Matty is surprised to find herself saying all that, with that much determination. But she is also glad for that. She might have done things she isn’t exactly proud of, but watching an innocent man suffer while she is a position to help is inconceivable, and that is something the agency hasn’t taken away from her.

“The last thing MacGyver needs is you, and Davis and Bozer too, doing something crazy, ok? He will need you, so think about that before another stupid idea passes through your brain.”

Jack takes a deep breath and nods. “How is he, Matty? No sugarcoating.”

“As far as I can tell, he is left alone for now. He hasn’t been hurt since—”

“Since the torture,” Jack growls. “Can you tell him something? Visit him again and let him know that we are working to get him out?”

Matty shakes her head. “Jack, this is the last thing I need to tell you. I wasn’t completely honest in my first visit. I’ve known that MacGyver is alive since I accepted this assignment,” she raises a hand, trying to stop the incoming fury, “Before you start to curse all my ancestors, I’d like to remind you that _I am_ committing treason and that I’m on your side. I couldn’t take your word at face value, I had to find out if he was innocent. And I did, but the last time I saw him, we didn’t part on the best terms, _please_ , let me finish.

“Mason was threatening MacGyver with something,” she sighs, “someone. I believe Mason was threatening MacGyver’s team to get him to coop—”

“Oh just say it already that it’s our fault…”

“That’s not what I am saying. It’s no one’s fault but Mason’s. However, the fact still stands that MacGyver was trying to protect you all by lying about the mole in DXS. He didn’t want to admit that he is innocent,” she doesn’t mention Cage, no need to get Jack all worried again. “And so seeing me now might look like a threat. He thinks I am working with Mason. If I mention you he will certainly get nervous and feel threatened, and I don’t think he needs to go through that.”

“What the fuck did they do to him, Matty?”

She thinks it’s a rhetorical question, at first, but the expectation on Jack’s face tells her that he really wants to hear it.

“You know how it is. Beatings, there was sleep deprivation at some point. Waterboarding, extreme temperatures. And psychological things that I can’t really know what they entailed in entirety.”

She doesn’t mention MacGyver’s hand, because at each word from the list Jack’s face crumples more, and this day has already been too exhaustive, and she will still need to deal with Davis and Bozer, go through a similar experience - though she doesn’t think she will need to pull a gun on either of them.

He slumps on the couch, throwing his head back, looking at the ceiling.

“Goddamit. I was getting drunk while Mac in a black site, alone, dealing with whatever happened to him… I can’t believe that I let it happen.”

Matty doesn’t say anything, it’s clear that whatever she says won’t really matter. Let Dalton ride the wave of commiseration and misplaced guilt before they start to work on proving MacGyver’s innocence.

** ** ** **

**Somewhere in Europe, three months ago**

Russ Taylor stares at the man in front of him, then back at the phone screen where he’d just watched a video. The people around in the cafe have no idea of what he’s just seen, they just keep living their lives, oblivious.

"Is this…" but he already knows. _It is, it really is._

"Yes. I've perfected the formula, corrected the minor problems…"

"Heart attacks aren't a minor problem."

The man shrugs. "It doesn’t matter, the problems are gone. It can be yours."

Russ stops, narrows his eyes. "And what would I need to do to get that?"

"I need you to convince the CIA director to look up an old case."

"What? How do you expect me to convince the CIA of anything?"

The man takes the phone off Russ’ hands and, after clicking and scrolling, he returns it, a file opened.

"You’ll show this to Amanda Moore and I am sure she will agree."

Russ raises one eyebrow. “And why don’t you do this yourself?”

“You know I can’t show up there, I just need someone with your kind of reputation to do it for me.”

"That's rich, coming from someone who is speaking of treason."

The man shrugs. “Don’t try to pretend you’re not interested. I know that you were briefly obsessed with KX7 in the past, until it became this sort of failed myth among the people who’d heard about it. Convince Moore, and KX7 is yours.”

Russ nods, there really isn’t a point in denying that. “And how do I know if you’ll keep your word?”

“You don’t. But I think you’re willing to take the risk.”

The man puts a flashdrive on the table and stands up, like he has no doubts that Russ will really do what he’s asking.

He’s not wrong.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thoughts?


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **A few additional/detailed warnings:**
> 
> This chapter contains a few instances of people being terrible etc, but you already expected that, I guess. 
> 
> Also, the warning for torture is for this chapter. It’s not graphic, and now I realize that maybe the M rating was a bit too much, but, well, I am a bit paranoid with rating. What I mean is: there’s nothing gory, but it is there.
> 
> There are also references to child neglect, both physical and emotional (but that comes automatically with having James MacGyver in the tags, right?)

**Four months ago**

James MacGyver waits in an office that belongs to Elliot Mason. He can hear the distant noise of cutlery against the ceramic of the plates. It’s the only sound that can be heard in the entire house. Mason is having a late dinner, having arrived almost at midnight, after another full day of work at the office.

It is Mason’s last meal, but he doesn’t know that.

James has been in Mason’s home for a few hours now, waiting in the dark. He knows that Elliot will come into the office after dinner, the man never stops, brings work home more often than not. His wife is upstairs, already sleeping—courtesy of a generous dose of sedatives, because Sofia Mason hasn’t been dealing with things well since the death of her only son, six years ago.

At first, James hadn’t planned to stay and watch, but something in him just feels the need to make it clear to Mason that James is the one who will kill—already killed—him.

Did Elliot really think that he could kill Angus and walk away unscathed?

It doesn’t matter what happened before Angus was killed, not really. James did what needed to be done, what _any father_ would have done. Mason chose the wrong person to get his revenge on for that.

Half an hour later, Mason comes into the office. The approaching footsteps are all the warning James needs to move and go to stand near the door. Elliot opens the door, his left hand goes directly to the light switch, but he freezes, as the scarce light coming from a corridor nearby is enough for him to see the gun levelled at his forehead.

“If you say one word, I will blow your brains out, and then I will go upstairs and do the same to your wife,” James says quietly.

Mason says nothing. Instead, he turns on the light and enters the office. Although his hands are raised in a peaceful gesture, the smirk on his mouth and the arrogant stare tell that he isn’t feeling properly threatened.

Well, he doesn’t know that he is already dead, has been dead since he ate dinner, so it is understandable that he feels like that.

“Why did you come here, MacGyver?” Mason asks, closing the door behind them.

As if Mason doesn’t know.

“Sit,” James orders, gesturing towards the chair behind the desk with the gun. “Keep your hands up.”

It’s not like there is a lot that Mason can do, except engaging in a fight, or getting a gun. The alarms and phones are down.

“So, James, I’ll repeat the question,” Elliot says, sitting down. “Why did you come here? I have work to do, if you don’t mind.”

“You know what for.”

“Then be my guest. Killing me won’t change anything, it will only get you imprisoned in no time.”

He expected more… reaction, more attempts of defence. Mason is far too calm. Does he think that James won’t do it?

“Killing my son didn’t change anything either," James replies.

“It didn’t. But it was fair,” Mason replies. “An eye for an eye and all that…” he smiles bitterly. "Although I don't think you cared about him as much as I would have liked to make all of this better, but…" he trails off.

James ignores that remark. It’s no use thinking of what he can’t change. And Mason doesn't have the right to speculate about that.

“The decision I made was professional, what you did was just mindless revenge.”

“Revenge, yes, but not mindless, you have to admit that. You think you are so superior, don’t you, James MacGyver? Above feeling like the rest of us. And here you are,” Mason pauses, his expression closing off, what might be hatred contorting his mouth. “This decision is not professional,” he says, gesturing at the both of them. “ _That_ decision was not professional. You threw my son to the wolves to save yours. To save the _brat you abandoned_ ,” he punctuates the last words with sharp jabs of his fist against the table.

Honestly, James tries not to think too much about that—not only now, but always. It wouldn’t change anything, thinking about those things, and he is doing the only thing that can matter at the end of things...

Mason continues to speak, his voice is barely more than an angry whisper.

“I _loved_ my son. I watched his every step if I could. I wasn’t away more than the work _demanded_ of me. When he decided to work in intelligence, I didn’t want it to happen. I didn’t push him into this life, like you did with yours, and if I had my way, he wouldn’t ever have joined the Army or the CIA, or DXS. But I knew that those choices were his to make, that I couldn’t take them away from him. It’s the curse of being a parent, not that you would understand it."

Not knowing what to say, James just stares, keeping the gun trained on Elliot.

“And in that joint mission, you decided that my son’s life was worth less than your son’s. Why? Did you regret leaving him when he was a child? Were you trying to atone?” Mason huffs. “When I realized that you did what you did, when I read all about you, I decided that I’d show you, then, how it feels to lose a son. My son was taken and tortured for months. When we rescued him his mother couldn’t even comfort him because he was so scared. And in the first opportunity he had, he slashed his own jugular.”

James swallows and looks away briefly, keeping the gun steady. He doesn’t think he is what other people would call heartless, even if he’s been called that many times. He doesn’t regret what happened to Daniel Mason—that is just something that he cannot do, not when he was saving his son’s life in allowing Mason’s to be killed.

It doesn’t mean that James _likes_ or takes pride in what he had to do. It is what it is

“Your son had it easy,” Mason says. “Two bullets, quick and clean,” he pauses. “I admit that your sentimentality now surprises me. You didn’t even go to his funeral—too busy fleeing away from the mess in your agency to bother with that… and now what, killing me for wh—”

Mason stops, blinking and clutching at his chest. He stares at James, tries to stand up, but James strides closer and pushes Elliot against the chair. “If you think of screaming for help, I will make it look like your wife was the one who poisoned you.”

As Mason moves, something falls from his left hand, clattering on the floor. It is a sort of remote control, with a few buttons and a biometric sensor. It seems to be off. That explains why Elliot was so calm during their exchange. He had something, perhaps an additional security system, that James didn’t consider.

Of course, Mason didn’t count on his dinner being poisoned.

Elliot tries to reach the remote control, but his movements are feeble, and James doesn't need to apply a lot of force to keep him on the chair.

“Do you think your wife can handle that accusation at this moment? She’s frail, isn’t she?” James hisses, holding the other man’s wrist.

This particular variation of KX7 includes only the undesired effects of the drug, and James needs the threat to hit home, but he can’t waste a lot of time talking to Elliot, trying to know if he activated whatever it is that that control is meant to activate.

“You’re dead since you ate your dinner, Elliot, there isn’t a way out of this for you. But you don’t need to drag her into this. So, tell me: whatever that is,” he points at the control, “did you activate it?”

Elliot's body crumples, he is now half-lying over his desk, panting, looking up at James with furious defeat, the corners of his mouth curled in what is mostly pain, but there is more there. Instead of replying to the question, he says those damning words, the ones that James himself has almost let himself consider in the past. Because of his short breath, it takes time for Elliot to get them out.

“Your son was a much better person than you are.”

James blinks at those words. He supposes they are true, but he never expected to hear them from Elliot, and has no idea of what motivated them.

“It’s a pity he had to pay for your sins.”

Mason doesn’t move more after that, and James forces himself out of the shock he feels after hearing those final words. He picks up the control from the floor and takes it with him, hoping that the absence of that device won’t be noticed by Mason’s wife. James leaves the house, as swiftly as he came in, after restoring the security systems and phones into their proper functions.

All the things he did for his son, including this, seem hollow now. James knows that he… made mistakes with Angus, and _that_ is something that he sometimes allows himself to feel regret over. Back then, when he was Oversight, commandeering his son on missions while Angus was none the wiser, it felt like the appropriate thing to do. It was always possible to change things.

Now, the only thing he can do is clean his son’s name, so that’s what he is doing.

He left Angus, but he knows that his son would have hated to be remembered as a traitor.

** ** ** **

**Present time**

Matty prefers to let the task of updating the rest of MacGyver's team to Jack. Tomorrow she will have a conversation with the Director, and she needs to prepare herself for that.

Before leaving and going back to Washington, they discuss a few more things, and she questions Jack about James MacGyver—Jack doesn't know much more about the man than Matty herself. There is a bitterness where Angus' father is concerned, but that is all. Useless. She will need to discuss this with Wilt Bozer, because he is the one who might have even met the man.

Before leaving, though, she is questioned by Jack, who calls her after she is already out of the door.

"Hey, Matty, it's not that I'm not grateful for what you're doing. Despite being mad at you for hiding things, I can't not be grateful" he pauses, giving her an assessing look. "I gotta ask, though, why are you doing this? Why do you care?”

The question doesn’t surprise her. Matilda isn’t known for being soft-hearted, but for her competence, confidence and sharp words. But then again, probably no one at the CIA would be categorized as that. The soft-hearted ones are either eaten alive or change in order to survive.

“I work at the CIA because I believe in what I do, but I can’t stand and do nothing in a situation like this one. I do know that MacGyver is not the first innocent person imprisoned, and he will not be the last. He is just the one I can do something about. I was assigned this investigation, and I will do it to the best of my ability. Besides, playing this the right way will make a lot of people owe me a lot of favours.”

She can tell that her last justification makes his expression soften some. Jack wouldn’t ever accept that she is doing this simply out of the goodness of her heart.

The truth is that Matty can't help but think about how many times similar situations have happened to others. She believes in the job she does, but sometimes things are too complicated. The opacity of working in intelligence is something that she's aware of since the naivety of youth was stripped of her, but this is one of the situations where the really ugly side of it is so evident.

But it is also true that she will be owed a lot of favours at the end of this, and she doesn't know exactly what she will do with those, but there are already half-formed plans beginning to spin in her head.

Jack nods at her reply and after they say their goodbyes and set a time for a call later—after he's talked with the other two—Matty leaves.

She is almost at the airport when her phone rings, Cage's number on the screen.

“Tell me you found something about Mason’s profile in the last half-hour,” she says, accepting the call.

“ _Nothing about his profile. But maybe something about his death, and certainly about his son’s._ ”

Closing her eyes, Matty allows herself a deep sigh. “I can’t say I am not surprised, but I really shouldn’t be. What have you found?"

“ _I got the notes of the therapist of Mason’s wife, Sofia, and from there I found out that she blamed him for the death of their son, Daniel. It caused huge problems in their marriage in the last years before his death._ ”

“Ok, but how does that help us? Do you think Sofia might have killed Mason? There wasn’t anything suspicious about his death.”

“ _I think that there is more to the death of their son, Matty. Officially he was killed in a hit and run, but the things that Sofia said to her therapist don’t match that._ ”

Matty stops, thinking.

“And how do you think he was killed?”

“ _I don’t know yet. I know it doesn’t seem like much, but at least it is something for me to look into. Because with everything else I got only to dead ends._ ”

“Do that, then,” Matty says. “And also find out if Sofia could be connected to Elliot’s death. Maybe someone convinced her to do it.”

“ _I don’t think that is the case,_ ” Cage says, and there is the sound of paper rustling.

Well, it's not like anything in this whole mess is what they think, so Matty doesn't want to discard any possibility.

“ _Sofia wouldn’t be able to pull that off, or hide it afterwards. I don’t think so. But you should have more luck with that, with access to the database,”_ she lowers her voice. “ _I gotta go._ ”

I wrote it off as non-suspicious, but, who knows…”

And if the CIA is not investigating the death of the previous director, well… then she really needs to be prepared to talk with Amanda, this might be her most valuable bargaining chip.

** ** ** **

Elliot Mason died in his own home while he worked. There was no sign of struggle, and nothing in his alarm system that seemed suspicious. The cause of death was a myocardial infarction. He had a history of high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol, both of which would put him at risk of cardiovascular diseases such as heart attacks or strokes, plus, he was probably constantly stressed. It isn't unbelievable that he would be the victim of a fatal heart attack.

His toxicological exam is clean of anything but the medication he was prescribed by his cardiologist.

There is no reason to believe that his death was anything but natural. And yet.

Whoever started this either waited until Mason naturally died… or they got tired of waiting.

Matty follows the trail left by Mason’s medical records, compares things, and she doesn’t find anything interesting for the longest time. It is only when she compares Elliot’s medical history, the report of his death, and the notes of his wife’s therapist, sent by Cage, that she finally finds something.

At least it is something worth the wait.

 _Elliot just started taking a psychiatric medication. He’s been… better._ We _are better… trying, at least. He finally accepted that he might… need help, you know? He doesn’t want people to know, but… he might even look into seeing a therapist too._

That’s what Sofia told her therapist in a session that occurred six days before Mason died. But Mason’s toxicological report included only the medication he took to regulate his blood pressure.

Because that’s all they knew he was taking. He was seeing a psychiatrist out of the agency.

Her mind goes back to one of the last things she discussed with Jack yesterday: the person behind this might not be interested in helping MacGyver at all. What kept them from acting sooner? Maybe their target is the CIA, and the DXS situation is the way to… but no, whoever is doing this has to know that what happened with DXS wouldn’t be a huge blow to the CIA, in the great scheme of things.

It could be about Mason, personally, too. But he is dead, and it is a bit pointless to carry out revenge if your target is dead. Right?

They will need to be very careful with that, because the person who orchestrated this might just decide to throw MacGyver under the bus if they get what they want before his innocence can be proved.

Unless… unless this is about MacGyver, and they needed time to get their hands on something to bargain with. Yes, that is equally possible. Maybe this was about DXS Oversight, after all. Or…

It could be related to MacGyver’s father. Why did he leave?

It is weird, the man leaving just out of the blue. If Jack doesn’t know much about what happened, perhaps Wilt Bozer does. She will need to ask him in their next meeting.

What matters, right now, is that Matty possibly has a very good thing to bargain with.

** ** ** **

Amanda Moore locks the door of her office after she lets Matty in. Moore is wearing her dark hair in a ponytail, it makes her stern expression stand out even more.

"What have you found about the DXS investigation?" Moore asks as soon as both of them are sitting.

"I found out something interesting about why the investigation was reopened."

Moore raises one eyebrow. "I am sure you did."

"I hope the intel you were promised is good enough to justify all this mess."

Amanda frowns minutely, seems to debate something with herself before speaking again.

"Agent Webber, I wasn't promised any intel, although I made it appear like that was the case. The only reason I am telling you this is to stress how important your job is," she pauses and leans against the back of her chair. "Someone has files on past clandestine US operations in many countries. Detailed, genuine information. We weren't offered intel, we are being threatened by the person holding these files."

Matty inhales sharply. "And you trust Russ Taylor, an operative known to run black ops, to keep his end of the deal when all is said and done?"

Moore laughs. "I have Taylor under constant surveillance, Webber. He would be dead by now if I thought that would be the end to this. But I don't think he is the one behind it all."

"And you didn't extract him for interrogation because?" Matty knows she is pushing, but she doesn't particularly care about that now.

"Because I don't have the slightest idea about who is behind this," Matty closes her eyes when Moore speaks. She feared something like that. "Believe me when I say that a lot of manpower is directed at this matter since Taylor got in touch—actually, we had eyes on him even before this happened, but now he literally can’t breathe without me knowing, but I don’t know who else knows everything about what he does" she stares at Matty's eyes, "so I ask again, Agent Webber, how is your investigation going?"

"I made progress."

"I have no doubts you did. That is why I assigned you to this case," her stare is calculating. "But is it the kind of progress that helps me to avoid our country going to war?"

"Not yet,” she says truthfully. “But I believe I am close to that.”

If the Earth and the Sun are close, then, yes, she is close to solving this mess.

Moore sighs. "I know that you've been doing things behind my back," Matty doesn't react to that, not even to deny it. "I am letting this happen. Whatever you are doing, I believe you won't risk your career, your reputation _or_ your country doing something stupid, but don't think I am not aware."

Matty nods once. "I am doing an honest and thorough investigation."

"And does that honest and thorough investigation include recruiting external help?"

"Yes."

Matty debates on what to tell Amanda. Saying that her investigation led her to find that an innocent American citizen was accused of a crime he didn't commit and tortured by the CIA could provoke wildly different reactions on the Director's part, and she doesn't want to risk that, not knowing Moore very well to hazard a guess of how she will react. Moreover, Matty doesn't have proof of MacGyver’s innocence, so it would be a moot point either way. Still, she needs to give something, or Moore won't be satisfied.

"I believe I am very close to finding out who is helping Taylor. I don't have a name yet, but..."

"And you don't trust people inside the agency with that kind of information?"

Silence reigns. Well, Matty is being forced to make her play before she would have preferred, and worse than that, it is a bluff, since she doesn’t know if Moore is involved in forging the toxicological exam, but…

Her heart, beating wildly, is the only evidence of her nervousness. When she speaks, her voice, firm and confident, betrays nothing of that. It’s something she perfected as the years passed.

"Just like you didn't trust the agency to handle the previous director's death investigation."

Amanda breathes in sharply, the corners of her mouth turn down, and she shakes her head. "I should have known that you would know about that."

"Of course," Matty agrees, her pounding heart starting to calm down. Not only did she manage to make Moore back off, but now she's also sure that Mason was indeed assassinated. "But I understand where you are coming from, just like I think you also understand me."

Amanda assents, "Elliot was a competent director and I can only hope to do a job as good as he did. And he was a good man.”

Matty thinks back to MacGyver, all that damage there, and the obvious fear he felt of Elliot Mason. It’s a bit suffocating to hear Amanda referring to him as a good man. What does ‘good’ even mean? Matty isn’t sure that she would be able to put it into words, but she doubts that Mason would be included by her in that category. It’s complicated.

“But I couldn't let the truth about his death out in the open, not when it would have put our country in a war,” Moore grimaces, “I don’t even have a name to show. And Taylor was clear on his… request. The DXS investigation should be reopened and finished, and I’d also need to handle the matter of Mason’s toxicological exam.”

“I’ll get you the name. It’s probably the person who Taylor is helping, and I am close to finding out who it is.”

She’s not even remotely close, but she’s confident that MacGyver’s team will help her in that.

“Then you will have all my help, Webber. I put you in this investigation for a reason. With the problem I have in my hands, I need the people who will do anything to solve it. Your history tells me that you’re one of the people I can trust with that. I don’t particularly need _you_ to trust me, not right now.”

What a strange concept that is, when put into words, but Matty finds she can relate to that attitude. It’s just that usually she is on the other side, saying those things.

If Matty knew the detailed contents of what Taylor is using to blackmail Moore, she might be closer to discovering the motivation of the person who is doing this, but she doesn’t think the Director would trust her, or anyone, _that much_. Frankly, she shouldn’t—Matty certainly wouldn’t, if the situation was reversed.

But bit by bit, she is getting closer. Matty knows a lot more than she knew at the beginning, and now she will have more help. Also, as soon as she gets the name that she needs, the person who might be—probably is—behind Taylor, she will have something to bargain for anything she might need from Moore; there’s no way to be a hundred per cent sure, but it is very unlikely that who killed Mason is not the same who orchestrated all of this. And Moore wants that name.

** ** ** **

In the next few days, Matty finds herself yet again in Los Angeles. Since her last visit, they already set up a plan of work. The first thing MacGyver's team is doing is checking their own profiles to make sure that none of them is connected to Mason—at least, not beyond being used in blackmailing MacGyver. Even though that is not likely, it would make no sense to simply ignore the possibility before discarding it for sure. They are also running checks on surveillance cameras in the most likely cities in Europe where Russ Taylor could have been—a very slow process, even with the access to a remote computer cluster with a lot of processing power.

While they do that, Matty is more focused on old DXS files that she had no access to before, and which Davis has recovered now. Until now, that hasn’t been fruitful to find the identity of DXS Oversight. She would like to confirm that Mason really was the person who killed Thornton and Carpenter, but assuming that this was a personal thing for the former CIA director, it could be that not everything would be registered as something done by the agency, or it could be that it wasn’t him.

Working with MacGyver’s former team is… an experience. Not surprisingly, Jack is actually the one who is less difficult. She can tell that, by his treatment that isn’t outright rude like in her first visit, but not as nice as from before she revealed to have kept the silence about MacGyver, that he is mad at her. She wouldn’t expect anything different. But in the end, despite how personal this all is for him, he is the one who has decades of experience in pushing emotions into a box in order to get a job done, and the fact that Matty is the person who more or less holds all the cards will keep him behaving, even if things aren’t going exactly how he wants them to.

And this mission isn’t just a simple job for him, so Matty is sure that he’s doing his absolute best—better than anything he did back at Delta, or at CIA and DXS.

Bozer and Davis don’t have that sort of experience, and their personalities aren’t exactly meek, either.

The man acts as if Matty personally offends him for existing, and, well, she supposes that in a way she did offend him, lying about MacGyver when she could see how clearly affected he was by his childhood friend’s death. As for Davis, it is quite certain that she went digging for Matty’s files, trying to do some sort of background check.

All of that is only mildly annoying, and Matty still prefers to be in LA when it is possible. If they find anything useful and time-sensible, she would rather be there to readily make decisions.

Before going back to Australia, Samantha analysed Sofia Mason’s profile, and she told Matty that it is quite certain that Mason’s son didn’t die in a hit and run. That is something that Sofia’s therapist probably knows as well, but he probably thinks it is the trauma of losing a child that makes her lie during the sessions. They, on the other side, would bet that Daniel Mason’s death involves some event that is classified. The question is whether that is related to DXS.

They are almost a week into waiting for the image processing when the first videos of Russ Taylor appear. Davis says that the results given by the facial recognition software she is using have varying degrees of accuracy, depending on the quality of the image. Logically, they start by reviewing the top results. Until the threshold of 70%, all the images are indeed of the man they are searching for. Below that things start to get a bit more complicated, and will probably demand some sort of image improvement before the videos can be run through facial recognition again.

What they do have, though, shows Taylor doing what looks like standard intelligence work—which is, avoiding surveillance cameras. Most of his recordings are from the situations where it was probably unavoidable to be recorded.

The one time they find something more substantial than that, it is _just_ what they need. It is late night, and they are reviewing the last batch of videos for the day, before Matty leaves to the hotel she’s staying at. The image from Davis’ computer is being projected to the television, and when the video begins, all of them notice that there is something different about this one.

On the screen is the image of a cafe in Berlin. There are a lot of people inside the place, it seems like it was a busy day. Taylor enters the cafe, his head bowed, but he does end up being recorded by cameras positioned in different angles. He walks to one of the corners of the room and sits by the last table there, where a man is already sitting.

Matty hears a sharp intake of breath at that and, turning in the direction of the sound, she sees that Bozer is gaping at the screen, blinking repetitively, as if he can’t believe in what he is seeing. “What is it, Bozer?”

Bozer shakes his head slowly, narrowing his eyes. He stands up from his chair and walks up to the TV, putting himself between the device and everyone else. Davis presses the spacebar on the keyboard, pausing the video.

“Come on, Boze, what is happening?” Jack asks. “You’re acting weird.”

Bozer turns to them again, one of his hands pointed at the TV, particularly, at the man that is meeting with Taylor. “This guy!” he exclaims, hand trembling a bit, “This man is Mac’s father.”

“He’s who?” Davis asks, a grimace of disbelief on her face.

Silence reigns for a long moment, as no one seems able to come up with something in light of that new information.

“Wait, wait… That man?” Jack says, standing up too. “That guy meeting with Taylor is James MacGyver?”

“Are you sure of that, Bozer?” Matty asks at the same time.

“Yeah!” his voice is raised. “I know it sounds crazy, man… But that guy there, he is Mac’s father. I’d never forget his face, okay? He was a kinda scary guy when Mac and I were kids, all serious and with disapproval dripping from his presence alone. I will always remember what he looks like.”

Matty did ask Bozer about James MacGyver a few days ago, and all that he could tell her was that the man wasn’t around a lot when MacGyver was a child and that sometimes when James was around, he would treat his son with unnecessary briskness, enough that even Bozer, as MacGyver’s friend, would feel scared. _I know that James leaving fucked Mac up, ok? But sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t have been worse if he’d stayed_ ,—Wilt told Matty, in a low, pensive voice.

Davis is staring blankly at the keyboard of her computer, and Jack starts pacing. Bozer turns away from them again, keeps staring at the frozen image of James MacGyver.

Huh. Matty herself is speechless.

Surprising Matilda Webber is something that doesn’t happen easily. And yes, she did account that James MacGyver could be involved in all of this, but to see it happen like this… well, it is still unexpected.

So, it seems like Angus MacGyver’s father is—used to be, more likely—an operative, or he was strongly connected to intelligence work. That might have to do with his leaving, and with everything about him being gone from the CIA database.

“What the fuck is Mac’s father doing with Taylor?” Jack asks.

“Wait…” Bozer says, “We think that whoever is behind Taylor is the person who killed Mason, right? So if we are right, James killed Mason…” he pauses, turning to look at the other three people, “so why did he take so long to do anything?”

Why did James MacGyver leave Angus to suffer for three years if he could do something?

“Because that fucker cares nothing about Mac, that’s why,” Jack replies.

Well, that is something that Matty has thought about before—why did the person who is behind Taylor didn’t act sooner? And it might be due to various reasons, but she doubts that any of these three people will be very willing to entertain any alternative where James MacGyver is anything more than, in Jack’s words, a fucker who cares nothing about his son.

Maybe James MacGyver doesn’t even know that his son is alive.

“What do you think, Matty?” Jack says, “He was CIA or some other agency?”

“Probably.”

“Shit. I should have known it was something like this,” Bozer says. “He was always weird, secretive, but back then Mac and I just figured it was some normal shit that adults did, not wanting children to know stuff… and like, Mac’s father? He was more distant than the other adults, so...”

“You couldn’t have guessed that your friend’s father was a spy, Boze,” Riley says. “ _We_ didn’t, until now, and we are spies too!”

“We’ve gotta find him,” Jack says. “Find him, Riley.”

“Wait!” Matty says before Davis starts to follow that order, “I know that this is upsetting for you all, but let’s try to finish one step before proceeding to another,” she looks at Jack. “I agree that finding James MacGyver is important, but let’s finish this video first.”

Bozer gets back to the chair he was sitting before, but Jack just stands, arms crossed, like he can glare the image of James MacGyver out of existence.

What follows in the video is: MacGyver passes a phone to Taylor, who, presumably, spends some time reading or watching something on the screen. He hands the device back, they exchange a few words, and MacGyver shows something else on the phone. They talk some more, MacGyver gives Taylor something that looks like a flash drive and leaves.

After that, Taylor spends some more time inside the cafe. When he leaves, he purposely stares at every single camera that is in his way.

“What the fuck?” Jack says when he sees that. “What the hell? Why?”

Taylor wanted to be caught on camera. He had been so careful before, but then, immediately after his meeting with MacGyver, he made a point of letting cameras get his face.

Why?

“That was weird,” Davis mutters.

“Riley,” Matty says, “run for James MacGyver the same thing you’re running for Taylor.”

And as for Taylor… well, he wanted to be found, so Matty can only do the favor of finding him.

** ** ** **

The thing is: Amanda Moore has Taylor under constant surveillance, and Matty doesn’t know to which extent the CIA director is an ally. Maybe the woman might decide that brushing MacGyver’s wrongful imprisonment under the carpet would be the best for the agency’s and country’s interests, trying to salvage her career after being blackmailed by Taylor. If Matty is being honest with herself, since things became clear about whether or not Angus MacGyver is innocent, she hasn’t thought that much about those general interests—they shouldn’t take precedence over the dignity of people, not like that.

In the past, MacGyver was an operative, and Matty knows that he went through difficult and brutal situations. But that was a choice he made, to serve his country despite the risks. What happened when he was taken by the CIA was very different.

An idea which is almost becoming a plan is taking form in her brain, and when all of this mess ends, she will act on that. One thing that Matilda Webber owes to her career and herself is to not be a willing participant in that sort of conduct anymore. What she told Jack is true: she’s seen terrible things being done, and stood by, watching. But eventually, it will get to a point when she can’t sleep soundly at night. And then what?

Since they can’t trust Moore, Matty gets in contact with Taylor, passing as someone who wants to set up a meeting to hire his agency for a job; a discreet meeting, due to the sensible nature of what is going to be discussed. After some discussion, they set on a place and date: in five days, at an isolated, unused office building in Portugal—Matty’s been using what she hopes is a decent Portuguese accent when talking with the man.

It is a risky move, because they don’t know how close a look on Taylor James MacGyver will be keeping. But anything they decide to do will be uncertain, and she prefers to be proactive. Besides, no matter what Bozer and Jack—and by extension, Davis—think of James, Matty has the feeling that the man did not go to such great lengths to cause more damage to his son.

The search for James MacGyver in the images of surveillance cameras will take weeks, possibly months, and there’s no other way around that. Matty doesn’t want to wait that much time, for two main reasons:

First, at one point, all of this will blow up. Things like this always do, and she would rather be the one in control of that instead of remaining little more than a bystander.

Second, she can see that her colleagues are getting restless. She is not naive to think that they aren’t making B, C, D—a whole alphabet—of plans behind her back. Sometimes they look at each other and have silent conversations that they must think she doesn’t notice. Dalton, Bozer and Davis _will_ do something incredibly crazy and reckless if things begin to take too long.

That is why she hopes, no, she expects, that meeting with Taylor will prove more productive and efficient than waiting for the image processing to be finished.

Jack is the one who gets them on a flight to Portugal—something about someone owing him, which allows them to get out of the country without needing to use fake IDs to travel commercially.

They are all working during the flight—they are always working, these days—when Riley mutters a “Oh my God.”

Everyone turns to her expectantly. She is staring at the screen of her computer with a mix of horror and realization that has Matty feeling apprehensive. Jack moves from his chair to stand behind Davis’, his eyes widening when he sees whatever it is that is there.

“I was running a regular expression script to, well, help us in not having to do all of this manually. And I managed to get a few of Thornton’s old files, she was keeping them under heavy encryption in a server in Taiwan, but, well… I got them. One of them mentions Daniel Mason,” Riley pauses, looks up, “He worked at CIA. He was an undercover agent who was doing a mission in conjunction with DXS.”

Matty turns to look at Jack, and he shakes his head in response to her silent question. He had no idea of that, either.

“And?” Bozer asks, perhaps sensing, just like Matty, that there is more to it.

“It’s not written in so many words, but…”

“Oversight compromised Daniel Mason purposefully,” Jack completes the sentence.

“Thornton had a ton of detailed things about Oversight, from the looks of it. I think she planned to use all of this against them.”

Which would explain why she died. It might not have been Mason, after all—if it really wasn’t a suicide.

“Let me see this,” Matty says, and Riley gives her the computer.

“Wait, what’s the date of this? When did Daniel get compromised?” Jack says.

Matty skims through the file. Six years ago, there was an occurrence of data traffic going to an unidentified remote location. It had been authorised by Oversight, and that occurrence presumably would have remained in the dark, if not for Thornton… and, what a surprise, Carpenter, investigating what was happening.

“It was six years ago,” Matty says.

“But what month?” Jack asks.

“June.”

“Fuck,” is what Jack and Bozer say in unison. Whatever those two know, Davis seems to be as much as in the dark as Matty herself.

“Care to explain?” Matty asks, staring at the men.

“Well, six years ago, in June, Mac disappeared for a few weeks. Back then I still thought he worked in a think tank, and although I had my doubts of what he was doing, I had no idea of the truth. All I know is that, when he came back, I could tell something had happened.”

“What happened then, it was…” Jack starts, pinching the bridge of his nose and sitting down again. “Well, Mac and I had a bad op, okay? I ended up having to spend some time at the hospital, and I only woke up two weeks later, but Mac got out mostly unscathed. Turns out that Oversight decided to send him on a solo mission while I was recovering, and Mac thought that something like that would be a good idea.”

“I take it wasn’t,” Matty says. She remembers, now, reading about it in MacGyver’s file, but she didn’t think much of it at the time, or at all. There is just so much information that she had to cram in the last weeks, and it’s to be expected that the people who _lived_ through those events would make a few associations before she could.

“Fucking understatement,” Jack replies, snorting. “He was taken, held for ransom by some German criminals. Nikki and Patricia went personally to retrieve him, and there were other agents involved as well.”

“And what did these criminals demand in exchange for MacGyver?”

“Intel. What kind, we never really knew, Patty said it was above both our clearances. But we were told that the rescue mission was a success, I just… I wonder now if it wasn’t,” he finishes in a strained voice.

“And when did Mason’s son die?” Bozer asks.

“August of the same year,” Matty replies.

“And from Sofia Mason’s therapist we know that Daniel likely didn’t die in a hit and run,” Jack adds.

“Shit, man.”

Matty nods. Yes, this looks bad. On the other side, this also looks like the motivation that Mason would need to destroy DXS and, well, to frame Angus MacGyver specifically—as misguided as the attitude was, it makes sense. It is helpful information.

They only need to find out who Oversight is, now.

It is something that all of them discussed a few days earlier: did DXS have a mole inside, independent of Mason, or did the man cause that? In light of this new information, Matty wonders if this elusive Oversight was willing to compromise DXS agents more than once.

She wonders—and that is something that she will never say aloud in front of these people—if, in a way, Elliot Mason didn't eliminate a threat to national security when he destroyed DXS and, consequently, stripped Oversight of their power…

Well, there’s just a lot to think about.

But first, they have other things to take care of.

“Okay people, we might have found what was Mason’s motivation, but we can’t let our attention stray from what we will do in,” Matty checks the time, “less than four hours. Let’s focus on Taylor first, and then we will focus on what we jus—”

Matty is still holding the computer, and before she can hand it back to Riley, a notification pops up on the screen, indicating that another analysis was completed. She clicks on the icon and gets another surprise that makes her stop in the middle of what she was saying.

They finally know the identity of Oversight.

On the screen there are the images of many scanned documents, all of them are DXS files, most of them government documents, the sort of documents that shouldn’t be in Thornton’s possession—and Matty guesses that was probably Carpenter’s work.

That doesn’t matter.

What matters is that just below the signature of the person who was the CIA Director at the time DXS was opened is the signature of Oversight.

James MacGyver’s signature.

** ** ** **

**Three years ago**

The people holding him start enhanced interrogation with heat and cold. Those methods don’t leave visible marks, but they are effective to put him through discomfort—that’s all he’s feeling, or so Mac tells himself. He’s uncomfortable, and when the temperatures get too extreme, he also fears hypothermia or a heat stroke, but…

But he knows that these people want something from him, that they are doing all of this because they are after a confession, so it is unlikely that they will do something that actually threatens his life… only, the CIA has made that kind of error before. Prisoners in dark, unplotted places died while going through enhanced interrogation.

Mac trusts that his fate won’t be the same. He trusts Jack, who hasn’t left him since the Sandbox…

Eventually, when they notice that the method isn’t working, they try something different. Sleep deprivation. Another non-violent method.

Mac tries to reason with them—there are three people in charge of his interrogation, a woman and two men.

The woman and one of the men won’t give him any chance to say anything—all they wanted to hear is a confession. The other man sometimes listens to what he says, but he doesn’t believe in him— _I’m sorry, MacGyver, but we have proof against you, it will be easier if you just tell us the rest_.

Mac thinks that’s bullshit. If they had proof they wouldn’t need to do any of this.

He doesn’t remember everything that happens during those days when they don’t let him sleep, but what is comforting is the fact that he doesn’t break. Confusion, hallucinations, the headaches, all of those don’t break him.

Innocent, he is innocent, and nothing will make him say anything other than that.

When those things didn't work, they started the beatings, and when those don't work either, they mix it all together. Rinse and repeat. All controlled to maximise pain and discomfort, but never to put him in real danger.

And _then_ , then that one guy, who acts nicer, starts to make threats about his hands. "Everyone has a breaking point, MacGyver. I am sure that you, who used to be an EOD specialist, would find a lot of grief if your hands were to be permanently damaged."

The thought does give him pause, for a few seconds, at least. Because he is innocent, and eventually this error will be sorted out, he is sure of it, but he just hopes it won't be too late.

His hands are too important, they are a huge part of why he has a job, but that is beside the point.

If he couldn't work, he would have to leave DXS, and if he left the agency he would lose much more than just a job, he might lose his family. Jack, Bozer, Riley.

Swallowing, trying to bury the terror that the idea makes him feel, Mac croaks those same words again, to no avail.

"I wish I could believe you. It's a shame, really. I’m sorry, MacGyver, but we have proof against you, it will be easier if you just tell us the rest."

The guy even sounds like he's sorry, and Mac wants to beg—maybe this guy really wants to believe him?

No, he knows how that works. They will stop only if Mac gives what they want. But he would just like to be able to believe in something...

Where is Jack? Mac knows that Jack wouldn’t leave him to suffer through this—and the thought of _why_ that might be happening is suffocating. The others can’t be going through this same treatment… _they can’t_.

Hell, where is Thornton, even? She’s got to be dealing with this, right? And what of Oversight? If the whole team is being held, those two got to be doing something to get them out.

Mac is starting to feel too scared of what is going to happen to him. He's avoided thinking about the team, before, fearful that he might say their names and give his interrogators the wrong idea. He’s been so confused, he knows that at some point he was even hallucinating, seeing things and people that weren’t there.

When they weren’t letting him sleep, when they kept playing music so loud—a Metallica song, one of Jack’s favorites, Enter Sandman—Mac thought that his partner was there. He thought Jack had been brought in by those agents, in the hopes of making Mac talk. It had been terrifying.

And now he really, really needs someone to get him out of this place. He wants to ask if there is anyone trying to reach him, but he doesn't think these people will say anything…

Besides, he is pretty sure that he shouldn't insinuate that his team would work to free someone who is being accused of treason at any cost. The last thing he wants is to drag them into this.

If he hasn't already…

Come to think of it, why haven't they asked about his team yet? Maybe they are hoping he will bring them up; waiting for that, even?

Well, that will _never_ happen. He would sooner admit that he did anything they want him to confess to than bringing them into this.

Mac knows that his notion of time is shot to hell, between beatings and interrogations, and everything else. He doesn’t know how long it takes until, eventually, the man loses his cool and smashes Mac's right hand under the weight of a boot.

It hurts, hurts so much that he isn't even ashamed that he cries, screams, even asks the man to stop, like he can’t help himself but beg. Tears mix with saliva and snot as he contorts on the floor, trying to shield his hand from more aggression, but he can't even touch it without sparks of agony burning, going from his hand, up his arm, and stealing his air.

He is left alone after that. And the room goes cold. And hours—it must have been hours—pass before the temperature is brought back to normal. He notices that his hand doesn't feel right, he knows what that means, and _where_ is Jack? Maybe if they can get treatment this won't be so bad…

Someone enters his cell, it's a new face. A middle aged man, bald, wearing a suit. There is a chair on the corner, and the man drags it close to the place where Mac is lying on the floor.

"I am Elliot Mason, Agent MacGyver."

Mac knows that name, and it takes him some time—more than he would like to admit—for him to remember where from. Mason is the CIA director.

"I didn't do it," Mac says automatically. It's all he's been saying for days. Maybe Mason will listen to him?

“I know you didn’t."

He _knows?_

Is that why Mason is here? Because they found out that he is innocent? Is he here to tell Mac that he can go now? Does he want Mac to not say anything about what they did? Is Mason here to pressure Mac into not telling anyone?

Mac would even take that, right now, because he just wants all of this pain to end.

"The other agents, they don’t,” Mason continues, his voice with little inflection, “not that they particularly care, but they don’t know that you’re innocent.”

Mac swallows, his throat feels sore, his mouth is parched and when he licks his lips there is a metallic taste.

“But you know that I’m innocent.”

Normally, Mac would notice that there is something off, something really wrong about what is happening. But the pain, the worry, all of it makes it hard for him to process all those signs. All that matters is that someone knows that he didn’t do it, he is not a traitor, not a murderer. That has to be enough.

“I know. I was the one who framed you, MacGyver.”

Vertigo makes the world spin around Mac as those words hit the air. If he wasn’t already on the floor, limbs unable to support his weight, lost in pain, he would have collapsed.

“I’m sure you want to know why, don’t you?”

This has got to be one of his hallucinations…

He closes his eyes again, because the room continues to spin, making nauseous, and he can’t afford to throw up again, he doesn’t even remember when was the last time they gave him water…

When he is able to focus again, he sees that Mason is smirking, and Mac uses any energy he has left to glare at the man, who shows no reaction to that, and, instead, starts to talk.

Mason tells Mac about his son, Daniel, who apparently worked at DXS. He explains that Daniel is dead because Oversight purposefully compromised him, giving intel that led to his death in exchange for the freedom of another agent.

“Do you know who was that agent, MacGyver?”

Blinking at the question, he tries to shake his head, but stops when any movement jostles his arm.

“You.”

Mac recoils at that, trying to put some distance between him and Mason, but he stops when the movement makes his wounds flare with pain.

“Do you know why?” And before Mac can answer that one, Mason goes on. “Because _Oversight_ wasn’t acting like the director of an agency, when he made that decision. He was, I suppose, acting like a father.”

Opening his eyes again, Mac stares, then frowns. What the hell is Mason talking about?

“Have you never wondered why your father left? Did you ever think that disappearing like that could mean that he was an operative? You never met Oversight, did you?”

No.

No. This can’t—

Mason stands up and Mac flinches, trying to put his arms in front of his stomach, and covering the right one with the left. But the other man doesn’t touch him, and instead takes a phone and holds it in front of Mac’s face. The light makes his eyes sting, and Mac squints. When he refocuses, the image on the screen makes his heart beat faster, and the pain he’s in, just for a moment, goes to the background.

Because there, in the picture, is his father beside Patricia Thornton. They appear to be in conversation in the picture. James looks older, with lines around his eyes and greying hair… but not so different from the last time Mac saw him on his tenth birthday.

No. No no no.

If his father was Oversight… then—

Mason’s fingers swipe over the screen, showing Mac more pictures, all of them of his father: in a few of them he is, again, with Patty, but there is also one from him meeting with a man, wearing a suit, and Mac isn’t sure, but he guesses the man is a politician.

Lastly, Mason opens a document, keeps the screen in front of Mac, who takes his time reading over those words over and over again.

His father was the one who got Jack and Mac partnered up back in Afghanistan.

James was, throughout the years, always there. _But never there_.

God, this has to be a nightmare, maybe he’s still being kept from sleeping… Or this could be all fake, something to mess with him and get a confession.

There is a noise as Mason drags the chair away, and Mac is left alone for a long while—or, at least he thinks it is. He uses all the time to think about every single thing he can remember, anything that could have been a clue that his father was Oversight.

If his father _is_ Oversight, he’s leaving Mac to suffer through this torment, isn’t he? Because if James is the one running DXS, then he has enough influence to get him out of this, doesn’t he?

 _Never there_ , he reminds himself.

But why?

** ** ** **

When Mason comes back, he brings more photos for Mac to look at.

They are from… Mac’s tombstone.

In the pictures, Jack, Bozer and Riley stand there, looking at the place where Mac is supposedly buried. There are a few pictures of Jack alone, too, and in some of them, he seems to be mid-speaking. Is he going there to talk, just like he goes to his father’s grave?

Mac has no idea of how much time he’s spent here, but all that time, his team thinks he is dead…

And then it really hits him—he isn’t getting out. If they think he’s dead, there isn’t anyone working to get him out.

“There were two shots. The first one hit you, below your heart. The second one never hit you, but by the time the sound was perceived by everyone around you, it would have looked like both bullets hit you right in the heart. Dalton knows how that works. And the way you just… collapsed after getting shot, it leaves very little room for doubt as to what happened to you.”

Mac swallows, blinks several times trying to hold in tears that threaten to spill as the hopelessness of his situation becomes more and more evident. He isn’t getting out.

“You have a choice,” Mason says. He waits until Mac is looking up at him before continuing. “You can leave all of this behind you,” he makes a gesture with his hands, “and all you need to make is a choice.”

There is a glint in Mason’s eyes, a knowing one, like he’s sure of what Mac is going to choose. Mac reminds himself that this is a man who had his son killed by James MacGyver, if what he says is true…

Mac wants to tell Mason that James probably wouldn’t care about what is happening, but he doubts the man will listen to reason.

“You just have to choose who will be implicated in the whole DXS mole problem, MacGyver.”

Once again, he is shown pictures: one is from Jack, Riley and Bozer, and the other is from a man who Mac only knows in passing, from seeing him back in DXS. The man in the picture is holding a little girl in his arms, while a woman stands beside him, holding the hand of a boy. All of them are smiling in the picture.

He can’t choose between those people. It might seem easy to pick the man who he doesn’t really know, because he can’t bring his own family into this… but he can’t simply destroy someone’s life like that…

“I can’t do this,” Mac says quietly.

“It can’t be that hard to choose.”

But it is. Maybe Mason can’t understand that, in his rage in the face of what James did, but for Mac, it isn’t as simple.

He looks down at the pictures again, tries to see himself choosing to condemn an innocent man to save his team, but he can’t… and there’s not even a guarantee that Mason will keep his word, anyway.

There is one thing he _can_ do, though, something he can offer. And if there is one thing that Mac doesn’t want to do, it is to make the decision that his father would, if James were in his place.

Besides, if anyone is even closer to being guilty in all of this, it is Mac, and not his team, or that random DXS employee picked by Mason.

“I did it,” Mac says, staring up at the other man. “I did it. I can admit it, I will say that I did anything you want me to say.”

Mason frowns and takes a step back, looking at Mac as if he doesn’t believe in what he’s seeing. As if he wasn’t, ever, counting that Mac would choose _that_ instead of the unwinnable scenario that he’d planned.

But twisting things into something new, using them to his advantage, is Mac’s specialty, has always been, and he’s ready to make this sort of sacrifice ever since he boarded a plane and went to Afghanistan.

That man will continue to live beside his family… and as for Mac’s team…

Mac tries not to think of those pictures, of the devastation in their faces, because that is ephemeral. They will move on.

What matters is that they will be safe, and that he’s making a choice he can live with to guarantee that. He hopes that is enough.


	4. Chapter 4

Driving from the private airport to the place where they will meet with Taylor doesn't take more than fifteen minutes. They are two hours earlier than it was agreed, just in case.

The place is desert, it’s not been abandoned, although it looks like that. Apparently, the owner of the building intends to make renovations and rent the office rooms, and still has the place under camera surveillance, which is why they chose this place for the meeting. Isolated, but they can still know whether or not Taylor has already arrived.

“Unless he has someone who can hack the cameras without me finding out, he’s not here yet,” Davis says when Matty asks about Taylor.

Rust covers the hinges of the main door, the windows all have no glasses, or they are broken. The painting on the external walls looks like it was done centuries instead of decades ago.

Bozer and Jack are both uncharacteristically quiet, still processing their last discovery. For all that Riley also knew MacGyver, Matty supposes that for the two men the news of Oversigth’s identity was more shocking than it was for Davis. Bozer knew Angus since both were children, and learning that his friend’s father, who abandoned said friend, was his boss—and the boss of said friend…

Matty definitely doesn’t envy what he is going through.

She definitely doesn’t understand what the hell could have possibly pushed a man to vanish like that and… remain in the shadows, manipulating the life of his son. But that is something that she will need to think about once this next part of her plan is executed.

The meeting will happen outside, in the parking lot, and when it is almost thirty minutes earlier than agreed, they see a black car with darkened windows approaching. Riley and Bozer are hiding in the backseat, their own windows closed. As far as Taylor knows, he’s meeting only the person who is trying to hire him and one of her associates.

Taylor isn’t alone either, there is a woman with him, and when she gets out of the car, Matty sees Jack tensing beside her.

“I know her. Desiree Nguyen, she used to be CIA, we went on a few missions, it was before you and I started working together. She owes me.”

“Well, now it looks like she works for Taylor,” Matty replies.

Jack is frowning, “Must say, I never expected someone like Desi to work with someone like him, but…”

Matty shrugs and opens the door, “Expect anything from anyone, I suppose. Let’s go.”

He nods and also opens the door.

They are barely out when Taylor gives both Matty and Jack an assessing look, eyes widening when he spots her.

“Matilda Webber!” Taylor says, “I must say, I knew that I was speaking with someone who was lying to me, I just never expected that it would turn out to be someone from the CIA,” then he looked at Jack, “and whoever your friend is…”

“Jack Dalton,” the woman—Nguyen—drawls. “Are you back at the agency, then? Last I heard you went to Afghanistan to be a babysitter, and then disappeared.”

“Hey, Desi,” Dalton replies, voice tight. “And I didn’t know you left the agency to work in… whatever you’re working now.”

Nguyen shrugs.

“So, Webber,” Taylor starts, “What are we here to discuss?”

“James MacGyver.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know anything about this person,” Taylor says, retreating a few steps. “Let’s go.”

But there is movement—a similar action being executed by the four of them—and really, they all know what is happening here. In a split second, the four of them have their guns drawn and pointing to the person just in front of them—Matty and Nguyen, Jack and Taylor.

“No one is going to leave without talking,” Jack says. “We know you talked to him, Taylor. It was caught on camera.”

“We’ll just have to decide this with bullets, then, because I have no idea of what you are talking about.”

“You really don’t want to say that against me, buddy,” Jack replies.

Matty stares at Nguyen, wondering about what kind of shooter she is against. They will have the advantage here, considering Bozer and Davis, but that will be useless if Matty and Jack are dead.

Tension builds, it can almost be cut with a knife, steady hands that will at any moment pull the trigger—Matty can’t tell which of them will be the one to start, and she wishes she could trust Davis and Bozer _to do something_ , but she doesn’t. She’s never worked with them before, and she knows that even back then, when they worked in DXS, most of the fighting was covered by Jack and then by MacGyver…

Matty doesn’t take her eyes off the agent in front of her, but she tries to remember what sorts of places that could offer her cover are around.

“Can’t we solve this like adults?” Nguyen speaks, a smirk on her face as she shakes her head, trying to get strands of hair off her face. Her aim never falters.

“Solving this like adults will only happen if your friend here tells us what he knows about James MacGyver, Desi,” Jack replies. “Besides, I always thought you were one to make good on your debts.”

Matty chances a glance at Jack. Really, he is invoking some kind of debt that Nguyen, apparently, owes him? Now?

“I already told you,” Taylor speaks, “I don’t know what you’re all talking about. If you put the gun down, we’ll just follow on with our affairs and no one gets shot.”

If possible, Jack tenses even more, his eyes zeroing on Taylor.

“This sucks,” Nguyen mutters before continuing, in a louder voice, “verbena. Quicksand. Bootstrap. Grain. Throne,” she stares at Matty while she enunciates the words, and at the end, her arm moves, aim now trained on Taylor.

Jack looks at Matty, a question on his face. She nods. Yes, that is a currently valid code for undercover CIA operatives. Moore did tell Matty that the CIA had been interested in Taylor even before he started to blackmail the agency—apparently, interested enough to get a deep-cover agent in his agency.

“Oh, come on!” Taylor says as he sees now three guns pointing at him, “Really, Desi?”

The woman shrugs and says “sorry”, but her voice and posture are unapologetic.

That’s the second time that Taylor is surprised today, and Matty has to admit that she enjoys this kind of game—even though she is deep into a confusing and messy case, there are people who are even less in control than she is.

“Is there someone else with you?” Jack asks.

“No,” she answers.

“Riley, Boze, you two can come out. And you,” Jack tells Taylor. “Just drop the gun.”

Taylor sighs but does drop the gun.

Jack, Bozer and Riley take Taylor inside the building to question him, while Matty pulls Nguyen aside to discuss things. She does outrank the other agent, but Matty wants to contain what has happened here—someone being undercover isn't something that she accounted for, and she would rather if Nguyen's handler didn't learn about what just happened.

Which leaves her with only one choice: to talk to Moore.

"Before you contact your handler, I need to make a call," Matty says, already searching for Moore's contact.

The Director picks up at the third ring.

"I contacted Taylor," Matty says by way of greeting. "And I came across Agent Nguyen."

" _I see_ ," Moore replies, voice emotionless, betraying nothing of what she thinks of Matty deciding to leave the country without letting her know about it. Her voice only sounds tired. " _Anything else?"_

"Yes," her tone is loaded with meaning. Matty can't openly talk about what they are doing here, not with Nguyen there, and without knowing how secure Moore's phone is—she _is_ the director, and a smart person, but it never hurts to be careful.

" _Excellent. Then you bring them to me_.”

“We will need to discuss that,” Matty replies.

“ _Discuss?_ ” that is followed by a deep sigh. “ _What do you think you are doing?_ ”

Matty knows she’s on unsteady ground right now, one wrong away from having Amanda pull rank on her, telling her to stop everything she is doing.

“What you asked of me,” Matty replies quietly.

“ _You don’t have the person, do you?_ ” Moore asks.

“Only the name.”

“ _Webber, do you have any idea of what you did? Of what you might have done?_ ” By now her voice lost the tiredness of before, becoming only an anger-filled hissing.

Matty walks away, putting some more distance between her and the other agent.

“I assure you, no one knows about this except for the people who are here and you. Director,” the last words she starts in a calm, even slightly subservient tone. Matty is used to appeasing the egos of people to get what she wants—the practice is usually a coin toss, but it never hurts to try it. “I have more information than we previously thought, and I think there is even more to this whole thing. But _I need_ your collaboration on this.”

And well, she won’t mention it, but both of them know that exposing the fact that Moore did a less than honest investigation about the previous Director’s death is an unconcealed ace she holds here. But there is no need to vocalize that threat, not yet, anyway.

“I will also need Agent Nguyen’s cooperation,” she adds before Moore can reply. “Both her silence and the information she has on Taylor.”

Moore takes some time to reply, and when she does, Matty almost sighs in relief. “I’ll contact Agent Nguyen. From now on, she will answer to you.”

“Thank you.”

“ _Don’t thank me yet_.”

The line goes dead after that, and while Matty walks back close to the other agent, Nguyen’s phone rings.

Matty waits until the other woman finishes the call before motioning for them to go inside the building.

“What kind of mess was I dragged into now?” Nguyen asks. She doesn’t expect an answer, Matty knows—the job always involves only knowing what you need to, nothing more and nothing less. Eventually, one learns to live with that frustration.

They stop just by the door. There are loud voices coming from the other side—mostly Jack's and Taylor's, but occasionally Bozer's and Riley's joins in as well. It seems like they don't need Matty's help right now.

“I need you to tell me everything about Taylor. How long have you been undercover?”

“Almost two years now.”

“And what can you tell me about him?”

“He has a lot of money but that isn’t the only thing that makes him dangerous. It’s the contacts he has. Lots of people that he can influence and call in favours. I have a list of his more frequent associates. He never trusted me much to see many of them, but, well, I was sort of his bodyguard, so it was inevitable that he would need to take me to places, like now.”

“What about the ops he runs?”

“I was never involved in those. From what I understand, he has a few regular operatives that do the job, but I didn't get their names. I only went with him to meet contacts and things like that. I have brief reports on what I do know about those ops."

"Send me those later, but for now, I just need your general impressions about the missions."

They spend a few minutes discussing Taylor, and then Matty sends Nguyen to keep watch outside, while she meets with the others, joining them in Taylor's interrogation.

** ** ** **

The inside of the building is in worse condition than the outside. The worst part is that there is a lot of dust covering the floor and floating in the air. It’s making Matty’s nose itch, and there is something sort of ridiculous in the number of times Jack has sneezed while they’ve been here. But she’s sure that everyone in this room has either been interrogated or interrogated someone, or both, in worse places.

A couple of hours later they have… unexpected information about Russ Taylor. The man himself claims to be trying to change his ways and use the money he has for 'the right things', whatever his concept of that is. For example, he claims to be bringing down dictators he helped rise to power in the past.

Matty is still sceptical about those things, but she is less quick to disbelieve him, because what Taylor says is mostly in tune with the intel Nguyen has given her. The agent says that from the sparse information she has, Taylor was running ops that were on the side of illegal, but not so much on the side of immoral, for whatever it's worth to use that word.

"You are blackmailing the CIA," Matty says, about three hours into the interrogation.

"Yes, about that. I have a quite good explanation for the way I approached Moore, I guarantee you," he says with the most confident tone of voice and posture—well, as confident as one can look tied to a chair and being forced to confess things.

Matty raises one eyebrow.

" _I_ need guarantees too," Taylor says.

"If you talk, I guarantee that your mouth won't be missing any teeth at the end. How about that?" Jack says.

"Please," Taylor rolls his eyes. "You know I've been in this for a long time, including a long time in psyops. Whatever _enhanced interrogation_ method you are contemplating now is not going to work."

Those two words make Jack tense. Enhanced interrogation is, after all, what the CIA calls torture, it is what MacGyver went through.

"An unreliable thing," Taylor adds, "those idiots thought they could reverse-engineer SERE training, but it wasn't the panacea CIA was looking for…"

"Shut up!" Dalton shouts.

Taylor looks a bit taken aback by the little outburst, even though he tries to hide it.

Clearing her throat, Matty speaks up, reining in the situation—her allies in this are all emotionally compromised, and the more Taylor refuses to answer their questions in meaningful ways, the more that's going to show.

"Listen, Taylor, you wanted to be found. We have the footage of your meeting with James MacGyver. You looked at the cameras purposefully. So cut the bullshit and start talking."

Taylor seems to be considering something. Matty has the suspicion that perhaps he wasn’t counting on being found by the CIA.

“I need my guarantees, Webber,” he repeats.

Matty narrows her eyes. “Fine. Consider yourself guaranteed to owe me when this is done, Taylor.”

That’s as good as he’s going to get, and nothing else.

Her plans of before begin to really take form, now, she distantly notices.

"Have any of you heard of KX7?" he asks, finally breaking the silence.

Matty has. She doesn't know what it is, a name like that could be about anything, but those three characters put together are not strangers to her.

"I have looked for it before," she says and then looks around, checking the reactions. No one else seems to be familiar with KX7.

"Well, do you know what KX7 is, Matilda Webber?” He has a smirk in place, probably guessing that she doesn’t know much about whatever KX7 is.

“No,” and pretending otherwise seems useless.

“One of the many CIA drug projects that failed. Until now.”

“Drug projects?” Bozer asks in an almost high pitched voice.

There is a stillness in the room. Those CIA projects are one of the last things people want to deal with. Jack visibly tenses.

“Only, it’s not a CIA project anymore. It’s solely MacGyver’s.”

Bozer snorts. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“You all are not exactly CIA material, are you?” Taylor asks, looking at Bozer. “You two,” he gestures toward Bozer and Riley.

“It’s because we ain’t,” Jack says. “Not all of us are,” he adds, "not anymore."

Taylor pauses, tilting his head, then shaking it in disbelief. “Matilda Webber, what are you doing?” But there is a change in his posture, it is subtle, and Matty would guess that Jack’s revelation somehow put Taylor at ease. Or as at ease one can be handcuffed to a chair and surrounded by people whose work consists, one way or another, extracting information.

Maybe her previous assessment of the situation is correct, and Taylor wanted to be found, just not by the CIA.

“That’s not your business. Now, keep talking about KX7 and James MacGyver.”

“Well, KX7 was one of the CIA miracle drugs, as I was saying. It supposedly created supersoldiers, but there were problems in the formula. It worked, enhancing the strength and resistance of the test subjects, but it also caused heart attacks in a hundred per cent of the volunteers. It was developed by James MacGyver, one of the agency's chemists. That was almost twenty-years ago. Since then, no one heard much about either KX7, or MacGyver.”

So James MacGyver was, indeed, in the CIA, before DXS.

“Until almost four months ago,” Taylor continues. “MacGyver contacted me and told me he could give me KX7 if I got the CIA to reopen an old investigation. He had proof that the formula works now.”

Something like Taylor described—a drug to create supersoldiers—is not a thing that anyone would want in the wrong hands. Actually, she isn’t even sure if _there are_ right hands to hold such a thing. What she knows is that Taylor, of all people, shouldn’t possess KX7.

“You did your part,” Jack says. “Where is the KX7 then?”

“Well, MacGyver changed the deal,” which is probably a euphemism for _MacGyver_ _fooled me_. “He decided that I’d only have KX7 when the investigation he wanted reopened was concluded.”

“I see,” Matty says through gritted teeth. That probably means that MacGyver will only contact Taylor again when Angus is free—if at all.

“How do you contact James?” Jack asks.

“I don’t, and believe me, I’ve tried. He called me to tell me about the change he made to our deal, but he used a burner, and when I traced the call it was too late to find him.”

Well, they will need to get James MacGyver. Someone who is willing to sell something like KX7 to anyone, no matter why, is not a person who should be walking around free. That, and he killed Mason, and who knows what else he did. It is likely that he was the one who killed Thornton and Carpenter.

“I am not sure exactly what is his crusade against the CIA, besides having his agency dismantled, but…” Taylor continues, and Matty isn’t surprised that the man knows about James being DXS Oversight, she is just glad that they aren’t learning this from him. It is curious that he doesn’t know about Angus—which could actually be related to Mason wanting to keep most things secret.

Mason’s vendetta was, after all, against James, who was probably the only person that Elliot cared that knew about Angus’ false imprisonment.

It is a good thing that MacGyver's entire team seems to not hold any love for James MacGyver…

Because no matter what happens, she knows that this will end with the man in prison.

Somehow, she also needs to end this without anyone getting KX7.

"How did James MacGyver know to contact you about KX7?" she asks.

"I was interested in KX7 in the past,” Taylor admits after pondering the question, “MacGyver knew that."

"Of course you were," Jack says.

"All that self-righteousness…" Taylor replies, looking back at the other man with contempt. "If you all must know, I did it all because I didn't want the damn thing to fall in the wrong hands. I knew that if I didn't accept MacGyver's offer, someone else would do it."

"Really?" Jack replies. "And did you think that James would actually sell KX7 only to you?”

“Of course not!” Taylor says, and the handcuffs rattle as he tries to raise his arms, stopping with a frustrated huff. “What kind of imbecile do you take me for?” Taylor looks away, leaving at that.

“You planned to track him down and kill him,” Jack says, it’s not a question.

“Obviously.”

“ _You_ won’t do that,” Jack says, pointing a finger at Taylor, and then he turns, looks at Bozer and then at Matty.

Matty can’t suppress a roll of her eyes at that, “You are not killing MacGyver.”

“No, I am not. I want to hear what’s his excuse for _all_ of this shit that happened. Then, he gets to apologize and beg Mac’s forgiveness, gets punched” at that, Jack earns an enthusiastic nod from Bozer and Riley, “and _then_ , if Mac just as much says—”

“You are not killing James MacGyver, Jack,” Matty repeats. “And I don’t know Angus as well as you all do, but I doubt he would approve of his father’s assassination. Besides, we need him alive.”

** ** ** **

Finding a man who spent decades hidden from everyone, including his son, who was his employee, will be a hard task; one that Matty would have preferred to do in the comfortable secretiveness of before, but Agent Nguyen’s presence ended up making that an unavailable option. On the other side, at least now they have much more resources directed to finding James MacGyver.

Giving Moore the name of the person behind Taylor forced Matty to also tell the entire story of what happened to Angus MacGyver, and what was Elliot Mason’s role in the whole mess.

They have no solid proof of MacGyver’s innocence, nothing to counter his own damning confession. But all the evidence concerning what happened in DXS, and James’ purposeful compromising of Daniel Mason were enough to give Moore doubts about Angus’ guilt. The recording of his interview was just the last thing that Matty needed to convince the Director of the high likelihood of his innocence.

But Amanda does not start to make the arrangements to free him, not right away. The first reason is the obvious one—no proof to speak of, but that one will be easily circumvented, all it needs to be done is getting one of the agency’s psychologists to look at the video of his last interrogation.

As for the second…

Assuming that James does know that his son is alive—which is likely—and created this entire plot to free him, well, freeing Angus is exactly what would motivate his father to disappear again, taking KX7 and State secrets with him.

Holding herself from arguing that point is… harder than Matty would have expected when she was given this case. What if they never get their hands on James MacGyver? Well, then she will really have to make good on her deal of helping to break Angus out of the black site. But going against Amanda on that matter would be, right now, counterproductive. It would be admitting that Matty is mildly emotionally compromised in this, and that is the last thing they need.

What she does argue with the Director, however, is the fate of Russ Taylor. Nguyen’s report on the man is not as damning as it could have been—as it appears, it might even be true that he is trying to reform himself, or whatever it is that he is doing. The important thing is: Matty manages to advocate in favour of keeping him free, and for now, that will be enough. When this is all said and done, however, she will talk to other people, in different parts of Washington, and convince them to accept the reopening of DXS. Fortunately, she won’t need to convince them of giving her the necessary funding—that part Taylor will be responsible for—but only an authorization for the agency to function.

If Moore knowing about James is a hassle, on the other hand, it gives them much more resources to look for James MacGyver, and to look for proof of his son’s innocence. The Director mobilizes a small group of agents to do both of those things and puts them under Matty’s control, who acts as a bridge between the CIA and MacGyver’s team—who, obviously, refuse to let the rest of this investigation solely in the agency’s hands.

It is a good thing that they have something to concentrate on, and Matty actually lets them think they are doing more for this investigation than they truly are, lest they decide to focus all their energy into thinking that MacGyver’s freedom is taking _too much_ time to happen and do something crazy.

When they do find James MacGyver, it ends up being… well, not an easy thing, but not the herculean task that Matty had predicted. It takes them almost two weeks of communicating with foreign agencies, running facial recognition softwares on surveillance cameras, and analysing travel reports, until they find the man in Germany.

Matty accompanies the task force sent to extract him remotely.

James MacGyver, when he notices that his hideout is being breached, provokes a series of explosions in one of the rooms of the house where he is in—the place looks like a laboratory, which more or less confirms Taylor’s allegation about KX7.

** ** ** **

When all of this began, Matty had no idea of how resolution would come, but one thing that she didn’t expect, back then, was to find herself interrogating MacGyver’s father. And when she learned that _he_ was the one behind Taylor, she didn’t think that it was likely that he didn’t know his son was alive—it was a possibility that she acknowledged, but James MacGyver doing all of this for seemingly no reason appeared to be out of character, according to everything she knew about the man.

But that is what James MacGyver says: that he had no idea that Angus was being held in a black site. Up until Matty offered proof that his son is alive, he refused to cooperate in the questioning. After seeing the video of the interview that Matty and Sam did, however, he became less disinclined to answer her questions.

Matty can’t help but notice that James’ reaction is… subdued, very different from that of Jack, for example—and Matty wasn’t there to see it, but she’s sure that Davis and Bozer reacted with much more than a nod and silence after learning that Angus was alive.

She isn’t judging James MacGyver, not for that, at least. And before entering this interrogation room, she hadn’t planned to let the opinion that MacGyver’s team had of the man colour her own impression of him, but… it is not only his flippant attitude that has her changing her attitude towards the man.

James did leave his son, and orchestrated his whole life from the shadows, and for _that_ Matty can’t stop herself from making a few judgements of value on his character—and if she’s a bit brisker with him during the interview than she would otherwise be, well, it’s not like that is harmful behaviour.

His reaction to learning that his son is alive also makes it harder for her to tell whether he is telling the truth.

“We already know that you were behind the first leaking of information at DXS,” Matty says at one point. “What I want to know is about the second time a mole gave up sensitive information. I think you know about that.”

The thing is: why did MacGyver kill Mason? And why did he reopen the investigation? Was it because Elliot destroyed DXS, and perhaps James expected to get back to his old agency, once things were cleared up?

For all that she knows, this man doesn’t really care about his son, dead or alive—he might have purposefully compromised Daniel Mason in order to save Angus, but that wasn’t something that demanded any sort of sacrifice on his part. It was, all things considered, easy.

“All I know is that it was a ploy for Mason to frame Angus.”

“Because of Mason’s son, supposedly.”

“Yes.”

At first, James had tried to deny his role in Daniel Mason’s death, but after Matty showed him the evidence they took from Thornton’s files, he gave up on that approach.

“You killed Thornton and Carpenter because they discovered what you did.”

James leans against the chair, stares at Matty, and doesn’t reply.

“What I don’t understand is why you killed Mason,” Matty goes on, “surely you didn’t expect to get DXS back…”

“I killed him because he killed my son—or that’s what I believed.”

Matty raises her eyebrows. “After disappearing from his life, pushing him into a dangerous career, and just generally manipulating his life… well, I find it hard to believe that his death would motivate you to risk everything to get revenge. You don’t look the type.”

Cage would have a field day with this interrogation, and it is a shame that she is not around for this.

“I suppose you regret leaving your son,” Matty continues when James remains in silence. “And killing Mason was the way to, hm, atone for that? It must have been terrible, to have all your plans—your son’s life, I mean—taken out of your control.”

“It’s not like that,” James hisses.

“Then how is it?” she raises her voice at that. “We have accusations of treason and murder against you, so I am very curious to understand why you did all of this, MacGyver.”

The man looks away, and for a second, the similarity between him and his son is striking, at least on the surface. But Angus looked anxious and afraid, all tense lines and nervous gestures; James just looks… annoyed.

“All of these crimes will be enough to land you in a cell in a black site for life, perhaps one just beside your son’s. That would be a nice father-son bonding time, don’t you think?”

“You can’t tell me that you believe that Angus committed treason.”

Matty stops at the way his tone raises at that, frustration carrying on to the sharp voice. She opens a manilla folder and takes a document out of it, sliding it over the table.

“We have, as you can see, his admission. A detailed one, at that.”

James looks down at the document, his mouth twitching briefly.

“And yes, it was under duress,” she adds, “after almost two months into his stay at the black site. The fact still stands.”

Matty is glad that Jack’s requests to be here were denied—allowing protocol to be broken while this was more or less secret was one thing, but once Amanda got her hands on MacGyver, no one else, except CIA personnel, were allowed to communicate with him. Had Jack been in this room, Matty would have refrained of using references to Angus’ torture to try and get a reaction out of his father, and the answers she’s looking for.

“Mason wanted to do to Angus the same that his son went through,” James says, as he finishes reading the document. “Daniel Mason killed himself after he was rescued, I think he was trying to… drive my son to do the same.”

Oh, that explains a lot, though it also raises the questions as to how MacGyver knows that, and why Mason stopped, and was content to simply frame Angus instead of killing him.

She supposes that the last question might never get answered.

“Now, back to Thornton and Carpenter… You killed both because they knew too much. They knew about your little act of treason that led to Daniel’s death, but I wonder if that was the only act of treason you committed.”

They’ve had no success in connecting Mason to the leaking of information that MacGyver was accused of, and Matty isn’t sure if Mason was the responsible for the mole, but that is the most likely explanation. She doesn’t think that James MacGyver would go to such great lengths to reopen an investigation that would lead to them finding he was guilty of treason.

Still, she needs to make certain that her guess is correct, and that there isn’t another layer of confusing secrets in all of this.

There is a knock, and then the door is opened, revealing Moore and a man who Matty recognizes as one of the agency’s psychologists specialists in interrogation.

“Agent Webber, we will take things from here,” Moore says.

** ** ** **

Matty waits near the interrogation room until Moore and the other agent get out. It takes them a few hours, and she uses that time to start her own plans for the reopening of the agency that used to be DXS. She calls a senator, arranges a meeting, then calls another and reminds him of what she did for him, once.

She also calls Samantha. It may be a bit early, but Matty is pretty confident of what she’s going to achieve, so she offers Cage a job in the future agency anyway.

By the time Moore and the other agent exit the interrogation room, she has already done a lot to guarantee her own future after this case ends.

“Walk with me,” Moore says after the psychologist leaves, and MacGyver is escorted back to a cell.

“What happened there, Director?” Matty asks, walking beside the other woman.

“James MacGyver admitted that he was the one who leaked the information his son was accused of.”

Matty swallows, her steps slowing down a bit. “You don’t think that’s the truth.”

“I think that, all things considered, this was a success. We can’t afford to bring Mason’s… conduct to light,” her voice has a mechanical quality to it. “It is one thing to know that the CIA made a mistake, it is another to let it become public that a previous director used the agency’s resources to execute a personal plan of revenge on an innocent man.”

Matty looks up, and sees Amanda shrugging—it is the most common gesture she’s ever seen the woman making. It is like she is tired of everything too. It is obvious that someone else—there’s always a person higher up—instructed the Director on how this case should end. It’s out of both of their hands.

Matty waits for the other to continue.

“James MacGyver would spend the rest of his life in prison for his other crimes anyway, so… one act of treason more will not make a difference.”

That is the truth, but seeing all of this ending with another person admitting a crime they didn’t commit leaves a bitter aftertaste in her mouth, even though that accusation doesn’t change anything for James—after so many criminal acts, one more is just a formality.

 _It is_ a success. Matty helped avoid that her country went into war, that a dangerous drug fell in the wrong hands and she helped to free an innocent man.

But… well, it’s no use thinking of that now. It’s out of her hands. It just serves to make her more certain that pushing to reopen DXS, and assume its control, is the right choice.

Matty is not, by any means, fooling herself into believing that she will never be put in the position of making choices like that one again. Matty believes in what she does, and in this line of work it is impossible to eradicate the need to make such decisions altogether. Minimizing their frequency of occurrence, however, is feasible.

“Also,” Amanda says quietly, “this way, KX7 remains a secret that very few people will need to know about. Officially, it never existed.”

Nodding, Matty gives her a slight smile, “that’s good.”

“You didn’t expect I would do that.”

“I didn’t know what to expect.”

“That’s fair,” Amanda replies, tilting her head.

They walk a bit more together, until each of them follow their own path. This investigation could have gone much worse, Matty realizes, if not for how she and Amanda both decided to approach this case and made their decisions.

“Angus MacGyver will be released as soon as I finish the paperwork for all of this,” she pauses, “you did a good thing, Agent Webber.”

“Yes, we did.”

** ** ** **

Three of the walls of his cell are pure concrete. The last one has a huge panel of reinforced smoked, opaque glass. He can’t see anything outside, but he knows that the guards can always watch what he is doing. Beside the mirror, there is a door.

Mac sits on the bed, picking at the strands of the blanket that he folded and unfolded a hundred times already. It’s been a few weeks since he was last interrogated, and by now, he is starting to feel less on edge because of that. Worry is still an almost constant presence in the back of his mind, but… well, he can’t do much, not here, imprisoned by these walls. All he can do is plan what he is going to do when those two agents come back—he is sure that eventually they will, and he’s got to have a way of finding out whether they were being sincere.

If they were not, then he will need to find a way of convincing them—convincing Mason—to keep away from his team. There isn’t much that he can offer, he knows, but he will offer any and everything he can think of to make sure that Jack, Bozer and Riley remain safe.

There is a voice that sometimes tell him that Cage and Webber _were_ being sincere, and that, in his overreaction, he wasted a good chance of finding a way out of this.

But Mason tested him before, so Mac tries not to feed that small flame of hope that wants to exist and take control of his being. He can’t have that sort of hope taken away from him, not again.

Logically, he knows that Elliot Mason is not immortal, but with everything that happened, it felt like the man was an unbeatable force that could control everything in his life, that held everyone he loved in his cruel hands.

God, if Mason is truly dead… if there is someone investigating what happened at DXS…

When he is almost finishing braiding the strands of the blanket, the door of his cell is opened, and Matilda Webber walks in.

Mac straightens where he is sitting, dropping the fabric on the bed.

Webber is alone, this time, and she is carrying a transparent plastic bag. From what Mac can see, there are clothes and a pair of shoes inside it. If he didn’t know better, he would say that he recognizes those pieces, that they used to be his.

The woman also looks different, she gives him a smile as soon as her eyes focus on him.

Also, Mac can’t help but ask himself what does it mean that she was brought to his cell, that they aren’t both in the interrogation room again.

“Mr MacGyver, good morning,” she says, advancing a bit inside, but stopping before she comes too close.

“Agent Webber,” he replies warily.

“I am here to tell you that you are free,” she says, “I know that you are suspicious of me,” he hastens to add, raising her hand in a calming gesture, “but I promise you, I am telling you the truth.”

Then Webber picks a phone out of her pocket and unlocks its screen.

“You may not believe me,” she says, “but I’ve got this to prove to you that I am telling you the truth.”

Webber presses a few buttons on the screen of the phone and then hands it to Mac. He hesitates to take the device and remains staring at the agent.

“It’s a… well,” she pauses, clears her throat, “a pardon. There was an investigation, just like we told you last time. The former director _died_ , and someone had the DXS case reopened. There is a lot to explain to you, but what matters is that you are free. We know that you were framed by Elliot Mason.”

Mac feels his eyes burning, and he isn’t sure if it is because he does or does not believe in what she is saying.

“I realize that the last time you saw me was in a very distressing situation,” Webber adds, “And all I can offer as an explanation for the way Samantha Cage and I conducted ourselves the way we did it is that we had to be sure that you were innocent,” she finishes softly.

Is she… is Webber, in a way, actually apologizing to Mac?

“Because I didn’t know if you were innocent, I couldn’t be honest with you before. I’ve been working with your old team to free you, I thought you’d like to know that.”

Mac blinks quickly, looks down at the screen of the phone that Webber is still holding.

His team has been working to free him?

That is a dream that he used to have, back, before the reality of his imprisonment really settled in. But he knew that was impossible, if they believed he was dead.

“They don’t think I’m…” he can’t say the word.

“Not anymore,” she replies, shaking her head, “they know you are alive. And they are very anxious to have you back.”

This is the sort of dream that Mac stopped believing in some time—he doesn’t even know how long—ago.

When he makes a slow movement, standing up to take the phone from Webber, he notices that his hands are shaking, and that his legs feel a bit like he’s run a marathon.

Mac collapses back on the bed, reads and rereads the document many times. It is a wordy thing, one page and half in length, and it makes it clear that the CIA has made a mistake in accusing him of treason. There is one paragraph that mentions compensations.

It looks real.

Webber waits in silence until Mac raises his eyes from the phone screen and looks at her again.

She offers him the package, “these are yours.”

Those really are _his_ clothes, he wasn’t mistaken in thinking that before. That means that they—his team, his family—they kept his clothes, all this time…

All this time, and he doesn’t even know how long it’s been. Years, probably.

“How long have I been here?” he asks, reaching for the bag with trepidation, still suspicious that she will take the offer back, that this is all a lie. When his hand closes around the plastic, and Webber lets it go, Mac exhales sharply.

“Three years.”

Huh.

That’s less time than he thought and he doesn’t know if that is a good or a bad thing.

Mac opens the bag, holds the shirt in his hands. The light blue fabric is not especially soft, but it is so different from the coarse jumpsuit that he’s become accustomed to…

“Go change,” Webber says, motioning to the small bathroom in the back of his cell, the only place where he’s granted some privacy.

He doesn’t go, but just stays there, staring at the shirt, running his fingers over it.

God, they kept his clothes, didn’t delete Mac from their lives, even if they thought he was dead… It’s an overwhelming notion, and he doesn’t know what to say or do. All of this still feels like a realistic dream.

“MacGyver,” Webber calls softly, “I can’t say that I understand what you’re going through, what you _went_ through, not beyond an intellectual level. And I know that this all can sound… unbelievable to you. But the truth is only one,” then her voice loses that softness, gets steady, “you are a free man, and you’re leaving this prison today. But I need your cooperation for that to happen.”

Nodding, Mac grips the bag tighter, holding with his left hand. He does go and change his clothes, and then goes back, following Webber out of the cell. The whole experience is surreal, and sometimes it feels like Mac is not there, but watching everything from far away, out of his body. They pass by a few guards, and some of them avoid Mac’s eyes—one of them, he recognizes, was the one who sedated him after he was interrogated.

By then, Mac becomes somewhat convinced that they—the guards and Agent Webber—probably are not lying, that either this is truly happening, or he is hallucinating.

During the flight, they spend most of the time in silence. Webber is always watching him, though, with this curious and careful look. He supposes that the woman doesn’t quite know what to make of Mac’s presence.

It is okay, he doesn’t know either.

Relatively, the trip doesn’t take long before the plane is landing.

When the door of the plane is opened, Mac is not prepared for the sight that greets his eyes.

Jack, Bozer and Riley are standing there, at the bottom of the stairs. Mac freezes where he’s standing, like he forgot how to do something so simple like climbing down a few steps. His eyes sting, and this time there is nothing that makes him hold tears back, not when they smile at him, and when it is Jack who is the first to come up—but Bozer and Riley are immediately following him.

Mac barely has time to prepare himself before he’s being enveloped in a hug, strong arms around his shoulders, and he tenses briefly, it’s been so much time that he’s been alone, and the last time someone laid a hand on him, it only brought him pain. But this—this is familiar, familiar in a way that he’d almost forgotten. And then there are two other pairs of arms around him, and it is an awkward group hug, it almost suffocates him.

Dazed, he just stands there, his own arms on his sides, not really knowing what to do, afraid _to do_ something and break this spell.

“I’m sorry, Mac,” he hears, the voice almost muffled against his shoulder. “I’m sorry, hoss, I can’t believe I left you there. I didn’t know that you were alive.”

Well, Mac knows that. He is one-hundred per cent sure that Jack would have moved heaven and earth to get him out of prison, if he knew that Mac was alive. He wants to say that, but everything still feels so unreal, and the words won’t come.

“Yeah, Mac, we really didn’t know,” Riley adds.

“And it’s been terrible without you, man,” Bozer says.

“I know you didn’t know,” Mac says, his mouth finally catching up with his brain. “I know. It’s okay.”

Jack’s arms tighten around him, “It’s not okay,” he says, his voice trembling a bit with tears. “Jesus, Mac, it is so far from okay.”

Well, he can see reason in that, but…

“Mac, you’ve got no idea how happy I am today,” Jack says, interrupting his thoughts, “no idea. Happiest day of my life, hoss.”

 _Is this real?_ God, let it be real, please.

“‘Course it is real, Mac,” Jack says, and only then Mac notices that he asked that aloud. “Feels like a dream, but it is real.”

It _is_ real. His belief in that is, now, the strongest it has been since Webber went to bring him. It is a belief that still wavers, but…

He finally lets himself believe in that.

** ** ** **

They go home, and Mac can’t help but find everything strange. The furniture is distributed almost exactly the same way he remembers, and in a way it feels like he’s never left.

He is happy, of course he is, he knows he should be, but it is like he doesn’t know how to show that. Somehow, he thinks he should feel something… _more_.

They are sitting outside by the fire when Jack notices Mac’s right hand. Healmost has a fit, and bombards Mac with questions about what happened. That is sort of a relief. It is terrible to remember what happened, but at least he can concentrate on, a point of focus that distracts him from the way he is flirting with apathy.

Jack goes inside and calls someone after that—and screams at them. It takes Mac a few minutes to realize that he is talking to Agent Webber.

“She didn’t tell us about that,” Bozer says, pointing at Mac’s hand, as he sits beside Mac by the fire, outside. It’s the place Jack has just vacated to go shout at Webber on the phone. “Jack is upset.”

Yeah, no shit.

Riley appears after that, bringing a few soda cans, she gives one to Mac and one to Bozer, sets one on the floor and then opens hers, sitting beside Bozer.

The memories he has of pizza and beers after missions are a bit… distant, as if they belong to someone else. But they are there, and, well…

He hopes he can go back to being that person one day, but doesn’t know if it is possible.

“No beer?” Mac asks, opening his own soda can.

Riley looks away, in the direction of Jack.

“Jack and alcohol shouldn’t really be together,” she says, “not frequently, at least.”

Mac frowns, looks at Jack too, who is gesticulating wildly while he talks on the phone.

“We all took your absence really badly, Mac,” Bozer says. “And that codependency thing you two have?” He snorts, “Out of the three of us, Jack was the one who went on an almost self-destructive path to deal with grief.”

“But we helped him,” Riley says.

“Yeah, we did,” Bozer’s voice is serious.

“I—” Mac starts, but then stops, putting the can on the floor. “Thank you.”

He has no other words to say, to express things he can’t even name. They did not move on, and it… well, it bothers him that his being away has hurt them so much. But they did not move, not like he thought—and even desired—they would. He can’t express how much he is thankful that his friends did not let Jack self-destruct when _he_ wasn’t around to stop that.

Jack chooses that moment to come outside. Riley and Bozer say nothing, so Mac opts to do the same, he just stares at the fire, keeps his right hand next to his body—it’s something that he does subconsciously, and he also doesn’t want to upset anyone again. Jack sits beside Mac, takes a deep breath, and then speaks.

“Have I ever told you all about the time when my neighbour Thomas and I broke Mr Miller’s window?”

All of them remain in silence for some time, until Riley groans and shakes her head, “not that story again, Jack,” she says.

Mac does remember that story. It’s one that Jack has already told dozens of times—he remembers hearing about that back in the sandbox.

“Well, it’s never not a good time to listen to that again, right?”

And then Jack starts to tell the story again, and, well, this time it starts a bit different, and it takes Mac a minute to understand that this is, actually, the plot of a movie—the story is familiar, and he is trying to remember where it comes from, when his thoughts just… run away from him.

He is thankful for the way Jack decided to do this. Mac supposes that his friend also doesn’t know what to do right now, so he’s just talking, like he usually does. That, in itself, is comforting, it makes Mac wish he could just forget everything that happened in the last three years, even if he knows that he can’t do that.

For a few moments, he just stays there, in silence, listening to the voices of the others, telling himself that this is his reality now. In a way, he just can’t wait to go to sleep and wake up tomorrow and see that he will still be here, free, with his family beside him, and not back in prison, that he will wake up tomorrow and know that this, now, wasn’t a dream.


	5. Epilogue

* * *

**EPILOGUE**

* * *

**Two months later**

This time, when Matty knocks on the door of that same house in LA, it is Angus MacGyver who lets her in.

“Mr MacGyver,” she greets him.

“Agent Webber,” he replies, “come in.”

He looks better than the last time she saw him, back when he was released from prison. His hair is trimmed, he put on some weight, and, well, he doesn’t look caged as he did back when Matty and Sam interrogated him.

“Where are the others?” Matty asks.

“They are outside,” he replies, ducking his head as he sits on the couch. “Riley convinced both Jack and Bozer that they shouldn’t hover while we talk,” he adds quickly and then goes on, “look, I’m really sorry for the way I acted back then, when you and agent Cage were talking to me.”

Matty wants to… shake MacGyver so that he stops being so infuriatingly quick to take the blame for things that are out of his control.

“It is okay, I understand, and so does Samantha.”

He nods, twists his hands on his lap, and Matty almost asks how he is dealing with everything, how his recovery process is going, but before she can do that, he speaks. Well, she can make her questions later.

“Jack said you wanted to talk to me,” there is a frown on his forehead as he says that, and his mouth is set on a worried expression.

“Yes, I wanted to ask you one thing. I have reopened DXS, an—”

“I am really grateful for what you did, Agent We—,” MacGyver starts.

“Matty,” she interrupts, giving him an encouraging smile.

MacGyver nods slowly. “I am really grateful, Matty… but I can’t go back to that. Not now. Maybe if you could wait, and I am not even sure how much use I’d be, whatever you heard about me, I am not—” he’s saying the words quickly, all at once, not even breathing between phrases.

“MacGyver,” Matty interrupts him again, trying not to let annoyance show in her voice.

She isn’t annoyed _at him_ , but at the situation, at this whole mess that happened and that has a man who was, by all accounts brilliant, talking about himself with self-depreciation like that, believing that anyone around him just wanted to use him for their own benefit. Matty understands where he is coming from, in a way, it’s impossible not to, knowing about how his father manipulated his life for years, and how he was used as a pawn in a revenge game planned by Mason.

That kind of belief is not easily eradicated, and Matty doubts that any words she has for him would actually be taken to heart.

“I am not here to offer you a job, or force you into one,” she says, instead, and waits for the message to hit home before continuing. “What I want to ask of you is something else. Naturally, DXS can’t continue to exist with this same name. I am here to ask your opinion on what the new name of the agency should be.”

“Oh,” MacGyver replies, eyes widening before he ducks his head, a chagrined expression on his face. “That.”

“Yes, that.”

MacGyver remains quiet for a minute, and Matty is about to tell him that he doesn’t need to hurry to think about the name when he speaks.

“What about Phoenix…” he frowns, “Phoenix Foundation?”

Matty nods. It’s a good name. The mythological creature that is reborn from the ashes. A fitting name, considering what happened to DXS.

MacGyver has a faraway look on his face, and Matty would wage that the choice of name is not only about DXS. Maybe MacGyver sees, or wants to see himself as a phoenix too, being reborn from the trial of fire.

Yes, Phoenix Foundation will do nicely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I finished a multi-chaptered fic! I kinda feel proud xD. I had A LOT of fun writing this, and I am grateful for everyone who commented and/or kudos-ed (is that the verb?) You are awesome.
> 
> I am finishing a one-shot that happens in this same universe, kind of a mini-sequel. It’s called “The Shadow of Yesterday” and it is an expansion of something referenced in chapter 3 ~~it’s pure whump, okay?~~. It should be up in the next weeks, so keep an eye for that if you’re interested.
> 
> I have tons of ideas, and I do kind of plan to write a sequel for this, to explore Mac’s recovery (because he has a lot to deal with), and also because there are people ~~The Ghost~~ who would like to know that Mac is, in fact, alive.
> 
> That’s it! I hope you enjoyed reading this, and I’d love to hear your thoughts if you want to leave a comment :)
> 
> -Maria.


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